Why Taika Waititi won’t release a director’s cut for Thor: Love And Thunder

Time to retire the #ReleaseTheWaititiCut campaign before it even really begins. The director himself, Taika Waititi, came out with a harsh stance against director’s cuts, saying he wouldn’t want to release the original version of Thor: Love And Thunder.

As the film’s stars have mentioned during the press tour, the first cut of the film was more than four hours long. Chris Hemsworth called that version “batshit crazy” and “like a Monty Python sketch,” while Christian Bale hinted at even more creepy scenes for his villain, Gorr the God Butcher. These are understandably tantalizing tidbits for fans, but in an interview with NME, Waititi assures us that those things weren’t actually good.

“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 says 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.”

Is there a bit of shade thrown across the pond at DC’s Zack Snyder, who released the most infamous director’s cut in recent memory to so-so reviews? Perhaps, but Waititi is mostly being self-deprecating about the quality of his own cut. In other words, Marvel Studios didn’t force a visionary creator to chop up his own work–the director himself thinks that content had to go.

“I’d say my cut would probably have a few more jokes in there. There might be a couple of deleted scenes but as I always say, a scene is deleted because it’s not good enough to be in the film,” he explains. “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!”