Despite hitting UK cinemas in just two-and-a-half months time, cameras are still rolling on Marvel’s next Phase Two offering as Thor: The Dark World undergoes its latest round of reshoots. Of course, given the rumours about a rift between Marvel Studios and director Alan Taylor (Game of Thrones), this would seem to indicate trouble for Chris Hemsworth’s second solo outing as the God of Thunder. However, speaking at the D23 Expo this past weekend, Taylor has brushed aside the suggestion, stating that the late reshoots are a normal part of Marvel’s production cycle…
“We’re in the crazy, chicken running around with its head cut off phase, which I think is not an uncommon procedure at Marvel,” Taylor told Collider. “They’re amazing. They will work down to the wire. Kevin Feige is always trying to make the film better, seeing if he can push it up. I saw them do it on Iron Man 3 and The Avengers. It’s like they sort of have to pry the film out of Marvel’s hands and put it up on the screen because he never wants to stop improving things. That’s the phase we’re in now. We are almost done cutting, partly because we have so many visual effects that you can’t go on forever. At a certain point, you have to take your hands of it, and let them do their magic. But we’re literally shooting some things this week. Anthony Hopkins is back in town; we’re gonna be getting some stuff from him. So, we continue to, what Kevin Feige calls, ‘plus’ the movie. There are new scenes being added even now. And I’m sure if there wasn’t a release date, we’d just keep on making it better & better… Reshooting, in my case thank god is not like you screwed something up and you have to do it again. It’s additional photography because it’s ‘oh what if we had a scene like this so that would make this happen over here.’. And they sort of find the movie through that process. It’s hard to get used to because that’s not [how it works] where I came from, but watching them… they are really good at what they do as we’ve all noticed.”
Taylor then went on to directly address the rumour about an alleged fall-out between himself and the studio, stressing that there was absolutely no truth in the report: “There’s a rumor out there that I was hanging on to a long cut and that Marvel wanted a shorter cut. Hilariously, that was never an issue because I don’t know what the running time is. The change it’s going through now had nothing to do with running time. There are some tonal pushes and shoves. We have relationships [in the movie] that we need to end the right way and there’re new ways of branding them than we had before. The one fall-out I had with Marvel was over music. I had a composer [Carter Burwell] that I really wanted to go with, and it didn’t work out with Marvel.”
Thor: The Dark World sees returning Thor stars Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Natalie Portman (Jane Foster), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Anthony Hopkins (Odin), Rene Russo (Frigga), Stellan Skarsgård (Erik Selvig), Idris Elba (Heimdall), Ray Stevenson, (Volstagg) Jaimie Alexander (Lady Sif), Tadanobu Asano (Hogun) and Kat Dennings (Darcy Lewis) joined in the cast by Marvel newcomers Zachary Levi (Chuck) as Fandral, Christopher Eccleston (Doctor Who) as Malekith the Accursed, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) as Algrim the Strong / Kurse. The sequel is set to open in the UK on October 30th and in North America on November 8th.
Originally published August 13, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
