At the end of the past decade, Taika Waititi was king. The new golden boy of Hollywood, the public’s darling, the king of laughter. After captivating audiences with What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, the New Zealander got the call from Hollywood and in very little time went from revolutionizing Thor in Ragnarok, the third installment for Marvel, to winning the Oscar for his Jojo Rabbit screenplay. Waititi got offers by the dozen to make everything the production companies were desperate to get made… And now, just 7 years later, he has discovered the other side of cinema: the cold steel of indifference.
How cool, titi
A little over half a decade ago, Waititi had his pick in the Mecca of Cinema. He could make the sequel to What We Do in the Shadows, the adaptations of Akira, The Incal, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Judge Dredd and Flash Gordon… And, of course, the Star Wars movie that was confirmed for him at the time and which was only described as “fresh, unique and unexpected”. The truth? Possibly, with so many projects on his plate, he’d barely even get around to pitching an idea to Disney… If he was lucky! However, a director so prestigious, with so many ideas on his hands, was logically destined for lasting success, right?
Well, the truth is that the same people who made him successful also brought him down: in 2022 he released the fourth Thor installment, Love and Thunder, and what half a decade earlier had seemed fresh and funny suddenly became stale and boring. The jokes already seemed chewed over, the visual effects from another decade and the supporting characters an absolute waste. It made money, grossing 760 million dollars (about 100 less than the previous one), but the bad reception from critics and audiences made Marvel thank him and let him go, even though at the time Kevin Feige even came to consider him for a high-ranking role in the company.
But now he was finally free of franchises and could do exactly whatever he wanted with his original ideas. He created the series Reservation Dogs, directed the pilot of Our Flag Means Death… and the year after Thor: Love and Thunder he screwed up completely with Next Goal Wins, a low-budget film that nobody cared about and that wasn’t especially original or funny. It was, in fact, too conventional for the director, and not even those of us who defended (yes, I include myself) his last Marvel installment excused him for this botch-up.
The director moved into the so-called “director jail”, but, luckily, he still kept enough friendships to find acting work in the series Time Bandits (which he created) or singing under a mask on, alas, The Masked Singer. You know your career isn’t going very well when you have to resort to The Masked Singer. And yet, last year it was announced that he was coming back in a big way, with a film with a 20-million-dollar budget, his last great chance in Hollywood: Klara and the Sun.
There’s only one small problem: it has already been released, and literally no one has paid any attention to it, despite having plenty of screenings in the United States. It has made back only 1.2 of its 20 million budget, and its international release has been canceled. And the question should be obvious: Now what?
It’s hard for the industry to trust a director again who has run into the same wall so many times. Yes, he has Very Young Frankenstein in the middle of post-production, but once it’s released it very much looks like no Star Wars, no Marvel, nothing. Back to square one for someone with an Oscar and two worldwide hits that made over 750 million dollars. That’s life in the business: if you’re no longer in demand, I’m afraid that’s all there is. And Love and Thunder sank his career in a way he can never, ever recover from. Poor, poor Taika.
