Before director Taika Waititi took over the Thor franchise and pushed it in a new direction, several key cast and crew members had openly expressed their disappointment with Thor: The Dark World, the second solo film to feature the God of Thunder.
With a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 66%, Thor: The Dark World remains the worst reviewed Marvel Cinematic Universe film. By comparison, the first Thor film has a 77% score, while Thor: Ragnarok has a 93% score.
In 2018, Chris Hemsworth told GQ, “The first one is good, the second one is meh.” Actor Idris Elba, who played Heimdall in the Thor films, said working on The Dark World was ‘heartbreaking’. “This is torture, man. I don’t want to do this,” Elba recalled telling his agent, in an interview to the Telegraph. And his agent said: “You have to, it’s part of the deal.”
Elba had just finished up filming the Nelson Mandela biopic, and was called in to do reshoots for The Dark World the very next day. He continued, “I’m actually falling down from a spaceship, so they had to put me in harness in this green-screen studio. And in between takes I was stuck there, fake hair stuck on to my head with glue, this f—— helmet, while they reset. And I’m thinking: ‘24 hours ago, I was Mandela’. When I walked into the set the extras called me Madiba. I was literally walking in this man’s boots. [Within] six months, the crew, we were all so in love with this film we had made. I was him. I was Mandela, practically. Then there I was, in this stupid harness, with this wig and this sword and these contact lenses. It ripped my heart out.”