“Three strikes and you’re out”: the 2011 movie that saved Kenneth Branagh’s career
When we sit down at the cinema to enjoy a film, we rarely think about the processes that have taken place months, sometimes years beforehand, in order to put together the movie we’re about to enjoy. Decisions on location, scripts, budgets and casting are painstakingly made, and as with Kenneth Branagh getting to direct Marvel’s Thor in 2011, careers can be made or broken on the back of them.
Not only did the choice of Branagh as director on what was a pivotal film for the studio pull him out of a personal creative rut, but it also arguably made Chris Hemsworth into what he is now, one of the most recognisable and successful actors in modern-day Hollywood.
Marvel movies, of course, are not cheap to make. The first Thor film was an incredibly important one in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which had really kicked off with Iron Man three years previously, starring Robert Downey Jr, and then the somewhat underwhelming The Incredible Hulk later the same year. Thor was seen as a key release to the future success of what they were trying to do with superhero movies, and Branagh was desperate to get the gig.
He told Business Insider earlier this year, “I wish I could tell you, ‘No, no, they wooed me’. But I had made three films that weren’t successes, and as they say in this business, three strikes and you’re out. At the same time, Marvel movies were not yet this phenomenon that would take over the movie business, so they had to think out of the box with directors, and I was one of those names.”
Although Branagh was known first and foremost as an actor, he had also directed films since the late 1980s when at just 29 he was nominated for both ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Director’ for his Shakespeare adaptation Henry V. By the time Thor came around he had helmed another ten films, but real commercial hits had been hard to come by and so appointing him was a definite gamble for Marvel Cinematic Universe President Kevin Feige.
But Branagh felt he had an advantage over the other mooted directors, which was that he was less scared of the material, believing he knew the right tone to strike with the film, writing half a dozen pages of the screenplay on a plane to Hollywood in order to present his vision. He got the job, and then the serious work was on, namely, who to cast in the lead role.
Branagh added, “We knew Thor had to be physically impressive; he needed to be big, he needed to be young to have the kind of reckless, passionate, rebellious soul that was going to be part of our story. It took a long time because we could never agree on an actor who checked every single box.”
While the idea of casting Daniel Craig was discarded, a delay in production due to Iron Man’s sequel coming out in 2010 led to the Australian actor Chris Hemsworth, who had only really been seen for a few minutes in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek and a couple of low-budget thrillers. The gamble on the lead and the director paid off massively. On a budget of $150million, Thor made $450m at the global box office, making a star of Hemsworth and giving Marvel another future franchise that could be part of The Avengers with Captain America and Iron Man.
The film also did wonders for another British actor, Tom Hiddleston, whose performance as Loki also led to his own Disney spin-off series and a main role in several MCU films. Three more Thor movies followed, finishing off with 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder, and Hemsworth will return wielding his oversized hammer in this December’s mega-movie, Avengers: Doomsday. Branagh, meanwhile, directed another nine films since Thor, and won a ‘Best Original Screenplay’ Oscar for 2021’s coming-of-age drama Belfast.
