Around Comic Con, it was suggested in an interview with director Taika Waititi that the final cut of Thor: Ragnarok would come in at the actually pretty short 100 minutes. As it turns out, the final cut was a good deal longer, clocking in at two hours and ten minutes. Now we know why.
“There was a time when it was going to be 100 minutes,” Waititi said in an interview with Collider, ahead of the film’s North American opening next weekend. “We were at about 100 minutes [around Comic Con]. We had just done our reshoots, so we knew it was going to come up from there, but there was a world where I thought it was going to sit around 100, no more than two hours.”
What happened? “After Comic Con, we decided to put a lot of the jokes back in,” he explained. This may have been influenced by the very positive response to the film’s tone coming out of SDCC, though it also might have just been the vagaries of editing work.
The first cut that Waititi was happy with, by the way? It clocked in at a whopping 2 hours and 40 minutes. Here’s hoping for some special feature deleted scenes when Ragnarok hits video.
You can watch the whole interview with Waititi over at Collider (link below!)
[Collider]