Thor: Love and Thunder | July 8, 2022 | Directed by Oscar Winner Taika Waititi | Ninth most profitable movie of 2022

[Factcheck]

All audience RT score is now below Eternals

[p a p i]

 

[ThomasNicole]

Fans and critics alike are split on their reception to the film, with many criticizing the film's lack of focus and clarity.

 

As it turns out, a large part of that may be because Marvel Studios reportedly told Waititi to keep the film under two hours. The latest report comes from The Ringer-Verse's Joanna Robinson, who says the filmmaker was told to keep the film shor

 

"Taika having a blank check on this is absolutely not the case. He got more leeway than he got with Ragnarok, but there was a mandate to bring this movie in under two hours. This comes in under two hours and they cut a ton of stuff out of this movie,".

 

She added, "Taika is on record as not being in director's cuts. We know Jeff Goldblum, Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey [were supposed to appear]. Gorr was definitely supposed to come in and kill a bunch of other people."

[Rebeccas]

1 hour ago, ThomasNicole said:

Fans and critics alike are split on their reception to the film, with many criticizing the film's lack of focus and clarity.

 

As it turns out, a large part of that may be because Marvel Studios reportedly told Waititi to keep the film under two hours. The latest report comes from The Ringer-Verse's Joanna Robinson, who says the filmmaker was told to keep the film shor

 

"Taika having a blank check on this is absolutely not the case. He got more leeway than he got with Ragnarok, but there was a mandate to bring this movie in under two hours. This comes in under two hours and they cut a ton of stuff out of this movie,".

 

She added, "Taika is on record as not being in director's cuts. We know Jeff Goldblum, Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey [were supposed to appear]. Gorr was definitely supposed to come in and kill a bunch of other people."

it has to be the VFX issue/shortage right? I mean they just had a massive global hit that was over 2.5hrs (NWH)… 

[WittyUsername]

7 minutes ago, Rebeccas said:

it has to be the VFX issue/shortage right? I mean they just had a massive global hit that was over 2.5hrs (NWH)… 

Not that it makes much of a difference, but NWH was just under two and a half hours. Regardless, it is the longest Spider-Man movie thus far, but it’s difficult to tell if that movie was a unique case, due to technically being a joint production. 
 

It wouldn’t surprise me if Disney saw the underwhelming numbers for Eternals and decided that the problem must have been its length. 

[tonytr87]

15 hours ago, WittyUsername said:

Not that it makes much of a difference, but NWH was just under two and a half hours. Regardless, it is the longest Spider-Man movie thus far, but it’s difficult to tell if that movie was a unique case, due to technically being a joint production. 
 

It wouldn’t surprise me if Disney saw the underwhelming numbers for Eternals and decided that the problem must have been its length. 

 

Studios never learn, do they? 

 

Marvel has had many, many, many hits with movies that run well over 2 hours...and NOW they get skittish about runtimes? 

[RRA]

Anyway I thought Thor 4 was decent. I get if you don't like it if you didn't like Ragnarok, but people who "loved" Ragnarok but are pissy about Thor 4 baffle me (again I wasn't one of those who loved Ragnarok.) They're both on the same level for better or worse. I give it 4 screaming goats out of 5. 

 

I mean it's gotten so bad, you're seeing a tryhard effort by such folks mad at Thor 4 by trying to conduct revisionism on social media by pointing to The Dark World* as a good model of "tonal balance." You know, one of the redheaded stepchildren of the franchise regularly called as one of the worst if not THE worst entry? 

 

At this rate I expect after She-Hulk drops for people to suddenly become The Incredible Hulk fans lol

 

*=Hey I've always liked TDW, warts and all and always went to bat for it. But I also remember back in 2013 when the Internet bitched that the film was "too jokey." Reminds me when there was a time when people liked Batman Forever before summer 1997. Remembering changing online narratives helps me to keep focus and perspective on these things.  

[Halba]

film looks terrible. MCU's 2nd worst after the bomb that was Eternals...

 

the runtime of 2h 5 min is downright TURD and is an embarrasment..who is running the MCU these days, where is feige? The miss marvel show was fairly mixed also

 

Edited July 14, 2022 by Halba

[reddevil19]

5 hours ago, tonytr87 said:

 

Studios never learn, do they? 

 

Marvel has had many, many, many hits with movies that run well over 2 hours...and NOW they get skittish about runtimes? 

Exactly this. It's what, about a dozen of their movies that are around 135 minutes or longer? Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily think that 15 extra minutes would be enough or that a movie needs to be long to be good. 

But clearly you need a tight script for a tight runtime, or you're left with a rushed film or collection of bad SNL sketches, as is the case with Love and Thunder. 

 

There's a lot of jokes that could be trimmed, add more scenes for Gorr, but even then I think the problems here are way too wide-spread. The whole thing seems to have been badly conceived and executed. For all its faults, I can see the intent behind Externals and the seeds of interesting themes and grander plot threads. I get nothing out of Love and Thunder. I'm just baffled at how bad this was. 

 

Anyway, I don't like to dwell too much on the negatives when it comes to forums, as it will inevitably lead to arguments, so that's all I'll say. After Ragnarok hit such a good balance, I'm just bewildered at how this turned out. 

Edited July 14, 2022 by reddevil19

[Rebeccas]

Yeah, I can’t with the “if you liked Ragnarok, this is the same thing” line of reasoning. Ragnarok was just a much better constructed movie, was paced properly and gave all the characters time to develop/grow. I guess the tone and humor remains but in Ragnarok it was just funnier, the jokes are much more memorable like there’s a reason why a bunch of them became famed memes lol. 
 

As for “what happened” here, I think they had way too much fun goofing around while making Ragnarok and that somehow became a big success so they thought we can just do that again here. But Ragnarok was Waititi’s first film working with a studio and I think he knew if he didn’t nail it he would be back to NZ so he actually worked hard on it despite the appearance of letting everyone goof around. L&T seemed to be rather low stakes for him cause he’s already made it and just decided to actually goof off this time. 

[Manny G]

It’s crazy how gullible and easy to manipulate fans can be. Whatever happened  to critical thinking?  Do you people genuinely believe that you’re better at these stuffs that people that work more than 15 hours a day on it. Internet culture really messed up the perception of the industry.

 

anyway,

 

Taika was very unprofessional during production. He was  doing way too many takes and filming off scripts sequences. He over filmed and even let the budget balloon. Marvel Studios reeled it in to pull a focused  2 hour picture out of it, because a lot of the footage was unusable in the constraint  of the MCU anyway.

[reddevil19]

37 minutes ago, Manny G said:

Marvel Studios reeled it in to pull a focused  2 hour picture out of it

If that was the intention, they failed. I don't think Taika should have been left to his on devices and deliver a four hour movie. I'm just bewildered that such a tightly run ship as the MCU ended up having to "salvage a somewhat focused movie out of the mess" rather than ensure they didn't get to that in the first place. 

[Saul Goodman]

Everything about this movie seems like Feige and Co. were less hands on. Still think the balance was perfect in Phase-2(Cap TWS, GoTG and first Ant-Man), but then again I like how wildly different every new Phase-4 movie is from the last!

[infamous5445]

Ant-Man 3 will redeem this terrible phase, mark my words

[p a p i]

1 hour ago, infamous5445 said:

Ant-Man 3 will redeem this terrible phase, mark my words

That is if we're not on Phase 5 already by Ant-Man 

[WittyUsername]

From what I recall, L&T was originally billed as the final movie of Phase Four. This was back before COVID forced Marvel to change things around. 

[Rebeccas]

1 minute ago, WittyUsername said:

From what I recall, L&T was originally billed as the final movie of Phase Four. This was back before COVID forced Marvel to change things around. 

I don’t remember that but GotG3 was absolutely supposed to come out before this, it was originally supposed to be May 2020… it just made so much sense as a post-Endgame adventure. Gunn was literally working on it just after Infinity War. It’s a shame we never got a full Asgardians of the Galaxy movie after the set up we got in Endgame. 

[WittyUsername]

Just now, Rebeccas said:

I don’t remember that but GotG3 was absolutely supposed to come out before this, it was originally supposed to be May 2020… it just made so much sense as a post-Endgame adventure. Gunn was literally working on it just after Infinity War. It’s a shame we never got a full Asgardians of the Galaxy movie after the set up we got in Endgame. 

I’m talking about the schedule that Marvel unveiled in 2019 for SDCC. James Gunn’s initial firing happened before that, which made BW the first movie of Phase Four. 

[CoolioD1]

yeah it's disappointing it wasn't the other way around. i'm sure james gunn would've come up with something more fun for Thor to do than Taika did for the Guardians (by which i mean better than basically nothing).

[Menor the Destroyer]

I find the idea that Marvel Studios insisted on a 2 hour time limit hard to believe considering how many MCU movies are over two hours.