God of Thunder silenced?
Thor 4 director once pitched unusual premise
Thor 4 as a black and white silent movie?
Taika Waititi pitched the idea to Postmedia in 2017, and though that’s unlikely to be the storyline, the Kiwi wunderkind is returning to write and direct Thor 4.
The Hollywood Reporter was the first to announce the news on Tuesday that Waititi will be back to followup Thor: Ragnarok. Star Chris Hemsworth is also expected to return.
The third instalment in the continuing adventures of Marvel’s God of Thunder was the series’ most successful, banking more than US$853 million at the global box office. Waititi, who won a TIFF audience prize in 2014 for his vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, was hired by Marvel to direct the 2017 smash after the studio decided it wanted a lighter tone for the popular franchise.
“Right from the beginning I could tell they were supportive of the idea of my style and my sensibility coming into this film,” Waititi told Postmedia in 2017. “They wanted to take Thor in a new direction, not just the character, but the franchise itself. Chris (Hemsworth) wanted to do something new with the character. And for me, coming in as the third director, I wanted to have some sort of ownership over it and feel like it could be my unique thing. To do that, we had to change the character and almost reboot the franchise without the hassle of recasting and rebranding everything.”
When asked about the prospect of coming back for a fourth instalment, Waititi said: “Whatever expectations we satisfy with this one, we’d need to go in a completely new direction and do something unpredictable. Who knows, maybe that means it would be a black and white silent film. Thor 4, black and white.”
Mining Thor’s comedic sensibility in Ragnarok was a risk, Hemsworth admitted in a separate interview. But taking the Marvel hero in a different direction was something that needed to happen if he was going to have legs beyond his appearances in the final two Avengers films — Infinity War and this past spring’s Endgame.
“I wanted it to work so badly and I knew that we left everything on the field, so I had such a positive feeling about our approach to making that movie,” he said in a 2018 interview.
But Waititi’s return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe means he is putting the brakes on his adaptation of Japanese manga Akira.
Marvel has not yet set a release date for Thor 4, but the earliest it would likely arrive would be 2021. The studio is expected to announce openings for Black Widow and The Eternals following this weekend’s San Diego Comic-con.