Marvel’s habit of poaching talented young writer-directors for their films has gone from something largely positive (cultivating diverse up-and-coming artists) to something seen as negative (wasting years of the lives of potential new auteurs on paint-by-the-numbers franchise filmmaking). Taika Waititi was an early example of this—Thor: Ragnarok was widely praised, but Thor: Love & Thunder was far less critically acclaimed, and now Waititi is very willing to let the studio move on without him. In fact, he never meant to get involved with Marvel at all.
“You know what? I had no interest in doing one of those films,” he said in a new interview on the SmartLess podcast. “It wasn’t on my 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.’”
Not only did he only take the meeting out of pure necessity, but he also had some disdain for the character to begin with: Thor “was probably the least popular franchise,” and he “never read Thor comics as a kid. That was the comic I’d pick up and be like ‘Ugh.’ And then I did some research on it, and I read one full comic, all 18 pages, or however long they are. I was still baffled by this character.”
Waititi ended up pitching Thor as an agoraphobic billionaire space prince, which was received well because “I think there was no place left for them to go with” the story. “I thought, ‘Well, they’ve called me in, this is really the bottom of the barrel,” he said.
Despite the fact that the fans “hated” Waititi’s hiring and thought he would “ruin” Thor, Ragnarok ended up being a huge success. And despite being ambivalent about Marvel to begin with, Waititi has nothing but good things to say about Kevin Feige and the studio now. “They’re good at keeping everyone in their lane, and making sure they don’t veer off into something else that doesn’t feel Marvel,” he said. “So they bring people in who are good at story and making great characters and bring something unique, and then they’ll keep it within the Marvel [style].”