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After Taika Waititi spent the late 2010s becoming one of the hottest directorial names in Hollywood thanks to his work on Thor: Ragnarok and the Academy Award-winning film Jojo Rabbit, the 48-year-old New Zealander is learning the hard way admiration is not given in perpetuity.
Following the release of the widely-reviled Marvel Cinematic Universe film Thor: Love and Thunder in 2022 and the equally disappointing Next Goal Wins earlier this month, Waititi is losing some of the shine that made him such a sought-after filmmaker.
Rita Ora’s new husband certainly isn’t helping himself in his interviews, either, where he’s come across as a largely smug and smarmy artist.
Take his recent interview with Insider, for example, which saw Waititi — perhaps jokingly — compare his work to the Bible.
“It was an idea of like, maybe it should be presented as a fable. ‘Cause, yes, it’s a true story, but I’ve taken a lot of it and turned it into my own thing. I mean, in the Bible, they took real-life things that happened and then they added, you know, magic,” Waititi explained of Next Goal Wins, which is based on a true story. “I’m just like the guy who wrote the Bible, bro.”
More so than the whole Bible thing, it’s likely the “bro” that’s bothering people as it’s sort of a microcosm of what’s become Waititi’s shtick, which is taking everything and anything completely unseriously.
Another recent quote from Waititi that’s been rubbing people the wrong way was his comments about his in-development Star Wars film, which he said will “piss people off.”
“It will be … dramatic pause… a Taika Waititi film,” the director said. “It’s gonna piss people off.”
Hearing that a new Star Wars movie is being designed to “piss people off” is certainly not what fans of the franchise want to be told, especially considering that both the last Star Wars movie (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) and the last Waititi franchise movie (Thor: Love and Thunder) were aggressively awful.