Branagh reveals Marvel Studios priced out straightening the Dutch angles in his 2011 Thor and only kept them because it cost too much.
Kenneth Branagh made Thor look like a fever dream shot on a boat, tilted skylines and all. Fifteen years later, he's finally telling us Marvel Studios wanted to undo it, and only backed off because straightening every frame cost too much.
On the On Film... With Kevin McCarthy podcast, per JoBlo.com, Branagh said there was a conversation "at some point in some part of the Marvel universe" about what it would take to "horizontalize" the 2011 film's Dutch angles. His words: "I am glad to say that the cash price for that process was so prohibitive."
So the movie stayed crooked. On purpose, mostly.
Branagh has never really apologised for the canted framing that became Thor's visual signature, and he isn't starting now. He pointed straight at Jack Kirby's original comic art as his defence. "Go back to any run of the comics, the classic ones, the Kirby ones, and look at the framing," he said. His logic: a story about literal gods needed a camera that didn't sit still and polite. "It was just what would hit you in a world, in a story about gods," he said. "I felt as though there was a reason for everything."
Fans have argued about those angles since the film opened in 2011. Some read them as artful. Others read them as motion sickness with a Norse mythology budget. What Branagh's confirming now is that the studio itself wasn't fully sold on the choice either, enough to actually price out a fix in post-production.
That it never happened says something about how Marvel operated in its early phase, before house style calcified into the wide, flat compositions the franchise leans on today. Thor remains the outlier, the one MCU entry that still looks like somebody with an actual point of view was standing behind the camera.
Branagh, for what it's worth, hasn't drifted far from big genre swings. He's currently on screen opposite Ryan Reynolds in Mayday, an action comedy streaming on Apple TV rather than getting a theatrical run, a call JoBlo's review flagged as a missed shot at closing the summer with a proper multiplex blockbuster.
No word on whether Marvel's current directors get asked the same question Branagh did back in 2011, about tilting the frame because a story about gods might actually deserve one. Given how uniform the studio's visual language has become since, don't expect a second Dutch-angle experiment anytime soon.
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