'Thor: Ragnarok' Almost Featured Fat Thor And Emo Loki
Thor: Ragnarok is in theaters now, and it will have no problem taking the top spot at the box office. With director Taika Waititi behind the camera, the franchise steered hard into comedic territory, even more than audiences have come to expect from the Marvel Studios superhero movies. But Thor: Ragnarok almost headed into John Hughes territory with a sequence that ended up getting axed.
In a recent interview, Taika Waititi revealed that Thor: Ragnarok almost included a flashback to an adolescent Thor and Loki in a 1980s-style version of Asgard. That sounds awesome in itself, but at this time, we would have also seen Thor as a chubby little kid and Loki as an emo outcast. Find out more about the Thor: Ragnarok deleted scene below, but beware of a minor spoiler for the movie.
Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Collider) was lucky enough to chat with Taika Waititi about Thor: Ragnarok, and that's when he revealed that the original pitch he gave to Marvel for the sequel included footage from some of John Hughes' classic movies. He doesn't name specific titles, but when he describes the sequence, it's not hard to imagine which movies he's talking about:
"I wanted this little thing, and maybe if we ever do a Thor 4 we can have it, but I wanted to do some flashbacks where Thor was a kid, a fat little kid. There was like an 80s version of Asgard where everyone had massive shoulder pads, and everyone had mullets (laughs). Our idea was Thor and Valkyrie meet and he's like, 'Hey I know you,' and she's like 'Ha I remember you,' and then it cuts back to this thing and he's just this pudgy little kid walking around with a mullet and being picked on by other kids. And Loki's like this little emo goth hanging out by himself. He was like [Malfoy] in Harry Potter."
So why didn't this scene end up being shot? Waititi explains that it didn't fit in with what they needed to accomplish for the rest of the story, specifically with regards to Thor's relationship with Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) in Ragnarok. Waititi explains:
"The problem was we needed him to not know Valkyire in the film and stuff. And then it became less and less of a thing to have a flashback. We would've been forcing it, so it would've been a situation where we would have been having a pointless flashback."
It's good to hear that Waititi didn't try to force this scene into the movie simply because it would have been funny. He served the story first, and since the scene didn't add anything integral to the story or characters, he left it out. But here's hoping that Waititi gets a chance to deliver this flashback to fans sometime down the road, because I want nothing more than to see a chubby Thor and a goth Loki quarreling with each other like little scamps.