Thor: Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi has a low opinion of director’s cuts. “I always say, a scene is deleted because it’s not good enough to be in the film.”
At just a hair under two hours long, Thor: Love and Thunder is the shortest Marvel film in a while. But it didn’t start out that way. Cast members have mentioned that the original cut was around four hours long, so the movie shrunk a lot in the editing bay.
But lest you think that this was done over the objections of director Taika Waititi, he assured NME that he cut all of that excess material himself, so don’t expect any Snyder Cut-style version of Thor 4. “I always say, a scene is deleted because it’s not good enough to be in the film,” he said.
This means that we shouldn’t expect a Zack Snyder’s Justice League-style director’s cut of Thor 4. In fact, Waititi seems to be opposed to the whole idea. “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,” he said bluntly. “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.”
All told, Waititi would prefer you never see what he cut from this 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!”
Granted, there’s a difference between what happened with something like Justice League, which went through a famously turbulent production that involved switching directors partway through, and with Thor: Love and Thunder, which was Waititi’s baby from start to finish. Still, it’s good to have multiple perspectives in the mix.
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h/t The A.V. Club