Taika Waititi’s more humorous take on Thor may be beloved by fans but, as it turns out, the director only took on “Thor: Ragnarok” for the money. Otherwise, he really had “no interest” in Marvel’s god of thunder.
Appearing on the latest episode of the “Smartless” podcast, hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes, Waititi admitted that, when Marvel first called him to potentially handle the third film in the franchise, his initial instinct was to turn it down. But then he considered his family.
“I had no interest in doing one of those films,” Waititi said. “It wasn’t on sort of like my whole plan for my career as an auteur. But I was poor and I’d just had a second child, and I thought, ‘You know what? This would be a great opportunity to feed these children.’”
The director added that, as a kid, he wasn’t particularly interested in the character of Thor and his comics, and that remained true when he started looking into the Norse god again for a potential take on him.
“‘Thor,’ let’s face it, it was probably the least popular franchise. I never read ‘Thor’ comics as a kid. That was the comic I’d picked up and be like ‘Ugh,’” Waititi said. “And then I did some research on it, and I read one ‘Thor’ comic or 18 pages, or however long they are. I was still baffled by this character.”
Waititi noted that the only thing he thought he could bring to Chris Hemsworth’s take on the character was more character. At the time, he suspected that Marvel only called him because they were stuck, and willing to try anything.
“I think there was no place left for them to go with that,” Waititi said. “I thought, ‘Wow, they’ve called me in, this is really the bottom of the barrel.”
But, when Bateman pointed out that Waititi must’ve had a good time, considering he returned for “Thor: Love and Thunder,” the actor and director conceded that yes, he did have fun.
That said, Waititi recently admitted that he likely won’t be involved with Thor 5, and he’s totally fine with that.