Thor: Love and Thunder is a hit at the box office and a lot of fans clearly love it. In fact they love it so much that many are asking for more of it. Taika Waititi has said that an earlier cut of Love and Thunder was over four hours long and now some fans are starting a campaign to see that version. However, there’s at least one major name not interested in the “Waititi Cut” and that’s Taika Waititi. He probably won’t be releasing a Director’s Cut of Thor: Love and Thunder because he thinks Director’s Cuts largely suck.
A lot has been made in recent years, especially among superhero movies like Justice League and Suicide Squad, about directorial intent when it comes to films and there’s a feeling, a not unreasonable one, that directors should have the chance to see their vision on the screen with as little interference as possible. But there’s also an argument that directors are crazy people who occasionally need to be reigned in, and Taka Waititi tells NME that he tends to subscribe to that perspective. The director explains…
I’ve been thinking about director’s cuts. I watch director’s cuts of a lot of other directors. They suck. Director’s cuts are not good. Directors need to be controlled sometimes and if I was to say, ‘ah you wanna watch my director’s cut? It’s four and a half hours long!’ It’s not good, at four and a half hours. There’s a lot of cup-of-tea breaks in there, you don’t even have to pause it.
Over the years there have been some high profile films where directors and studios battle over the final cut of a movie, such as David Lynch’s version of Dune. In some cases we have seen the director eventually get to release their vision of the movie in question, and sometimes that version has been objectively better. Ridley Scott is the king of the director’s cut, with most people in agreement that the later versions of Blade Runner or the extended version of Kingdom of Heaven are far superior to the original releases. The recent re-cut of The Godfather III is another that seems to be regarded as a worthwhile effort.
However, just as often, if not more so, directors' cuts end up adding little to nothing to the conversation. Taika Waititi himself says here that his four hour version of Thor: Love and Thunder is not good and would include plenty of points that you could skip, which is why they were cut out in the first place. Waititi also was against any extended version of Thor: Ragnarok. If Waititi were truly to make an extended version, it sounds like there are a few things he might consider adding back in, but it doesn’t sound like he would be adding more than a couple of minutes to the runtime. Waititi continues…
I’d say my cut would probably have a few more jokes in there. There might be a couple of deleted scenes but as I always say, a scene is deleted because it’s not good enough to be in the film. I think the deleted scenes section on the DVD, not that they use them anymore, should just be a list of the scenes and no links so you can’t click on them!
When Thor: Love and Thunder arrives on Blu-ray and on Disney+ in a couple months there’s a good chance we’ll get access to some deleted scenes and so fans will get to see some of what was cut out. There are probably some good jokes in there, but in the end they probably got in the way of the flow of the movie. The version you can see in theaters now is the version Taika Waititi wanted to release.
