It’s fair to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has changed the face of cinema over the past ten years – it’s broken box office records repeatedly and it made shared universes the new cool thing to do. As with any franchise, though, there are always mistakes made along the way, things that general audiences let fly but filmmakers regret long after the movie’s come out.
On that note, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has now revealed his biggest regret while talking to Uproxx – and it’s a bizarrely small detail. Specifically, it’s to do with the color of Chris Hemsworth’s eyebrows in the first Thor movie back in 2011.
Here’s how Feige explains it:
I’ll tell you one specific example I just thought of today and I laugh at it. Definitively, the one thing I would definitely do differently if I had to do it over again, is we would not have dyed Chris Hemsworth’s eyebrows blond in the first Thor.”
“Because we were like, Thor is blond! He has to be blond! And Hemsworth was great and awesome and pulled it off, but there are a couple of shots I watch and I’m like, oh my God, that poor guy, we made him freaking dye his eyebrows! That’s ridiculous! And I can laugh about it now because Hemsworth is Thor and he doesn’t need long hair, or a cape, or a hammer, or two eyeballs to be Thor.”
The producer’s feelings about the weirdness of Hemsworth’s blonde eyebrows might explain the continually changing look of the God of Thunder in the MCU. As Feige points out, the hero had both long blonde locks and eyebrows to match in Thor, and the look was pretty much the same for The Avengers. A different wig was then used for his appearances in Thor: The Dark World, Avengers: Age of Ultron and the beginning of Thor: Ragnarok. By the end of that threequel, though, he had cropped darker hair and lost his cape and right eye, too.
On a slightly more serious note, Kevin Feige went on to discuss his approach to looking back at the Marvel movies of the past decade and how he comes to terms with it if there are any niggling aspects of the production that he wishes they could’ve altered.
“It’s very hard. You finish a movie and it’s done and you watch it and it takes years to be able to look back at it and go, oh, we weren’t just forced to stop and put it in theaters. This actually turned out pretty well. And that’s actually fun to revisit and see the movies grow and change, even in your own perception. I think that’s the great thing about film.”
Continuing on, he said:
“But I’ll look back at any of the movies and see where we came to a fork in the road – in development, or editorial, or visual effects – and made a choice to go one way. And, seemingly, to the world it works. But we know there are three other versions that, boy, if we had gotten that to work maybe it would be even better. But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter because all that matters is the way it finishes.”
Thor and his non-dyed eyebrows will be back any day now, as Avengers: Infinity War hits US theaters on April 27th.