Taika Waititi doesn’t pay attention to the wider MCU, but still does what he’s told

While it’s true that Marvel Studios have been awarding filmmakers more creative freedom than ever before to put their own stamp on whatever material they end up tackling, every single film and television project still needs to fit into a cinematic universe-shaped box at the end of the day, including this weekend’s Thor: Love and Thunder.

Even the mere presence of the Guardians of the Galaxy underlines the need for connectivity; the cosmic misfits need to be aligned with the Odinson at the beginning of the movie because that’s where we last saw them in Avengers: Endgame, but they also need to be sent packing so as not to interfere with James Gunn’s upcoming Vol. 3.

In an interview with IndieWire, Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi admitted that while he doesn’t pay much heed to the overarching nature of Phase Four, he still has to make changes as and when required should they be dictated to him by those above his pay grade.

“I don’t do any research into all of the threads and storylines of Marvel because there’s too many and I don’t know half the characters. I don’t want to read any of the comics. I just want to do my film, just put the things in, then have them say, “You can’t do that, because that messes with this whole storyline.” There are so many iterations of this film. I would want to take a character and put it in the film, or kill off a character, but it affects all these different things I have no idea about.”

Natalie Portman already hinted that a ton of footage had been excised from Love and Thunder, so we can only imagine the writing process featured a similar number of ideas that ended up being cast aside, especially when the big and small screen slate continues to grow more jam-packed than ever.