Elizabeth Banks knows that her story about Thor: Ragnarok will become clickbait
“OK, I brought up Thor. You’re going to clickbait me in that fucking article now," Elizabeth Banks tells Variety. “I never should have said it out loud.”
Aux News Elizabeth Banks
Elizabeth Banks isn’t one to shy from action: the very title of her next project, Cocaine Bear, cements that. But sometimes, as she plainly admits, it’s the action that shies from her. In a new conversation with Variety’s Adam B. Vary, Banks reveals that the last project she was really excited about the possibility of directing was Thor: Ragnarok—but “nothing ever happened.”
“No one called me [back],” she says. “Taika Waititi got the job. Rightfully so.”
Over its history, four women have directed films for Marvel Studios: Anna Boden (who helmed 2019's Captain Marvel alongside her directing partner Ryan Fleck), Cate Shortland (2021’s Black Widow), Chloé Zhao (2021’s Eternals) and Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, set to premiere this July).
Per Banks, she doesn’t “get approached that much about doing anything” these days, even though she stresses she’s “open for business.” But at the same time, Banks says she’s only interested these days in telling stories that allow her some personal freedoms she can really sink her teeth into.
“I can’t do someone else’s vision,” she says. “I really want to bring my sensibility to things.”
No stranger to the whims of online media, Banks knows the Thor: Ragnarok stuff is the perfect tidbit to fuel “fucking clickbait.” But after well over a decade doing the interview circuit, she says she’s not all that bothered about it anymore.
“This article will be disastrous for me on some level, no matter what,” she says. “Someone will find something to put in some headline to get clicked on, and I’ll get in trouble with somebody. It’s fine. It’s part of it. Always happens.”
Cocaine Bear lands in theaters on February 24 of this year.
99 Comments
My take for this article is that there’s hope for Cocaine Bear in Phase 5.
isn’t there a huge Russian bear that’s Black Widow adjacent?
Ursa Major. although, a character named that shows up in Shortland’s movie they aren’t a kickass bipedal bear.
Ursa Major! He’s a member of the Winter Guard, the Russian version of the Avengers!
Indeed there is!
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Mikhail_Ursus_(Earth-616)
I presumed that was a Red Guardian/David Harbor joke until I saw below abut the actual bear.
They better not rope Cocaine Bear into it until the Pizza Rat solo film.
“I want to talk to you about the Cocaine Bear Initiative. And, hear me out, because it sounds pretty fucked up at first.”
Sadly the super hero team made up of wild animals on drugs didn’t go as planned. Sure Cocaine Bear, Meth Badger and PCP Cobra all could hold their own in a fight. Pot Wolf, Heroine Cougar and LSD Llama were all useless
I saw a trailer for Cocaine Bear recently and my reaction was like “what the fuck is this”. Then I found out it was based on a true story and was delighted.But then I found out the bear died from the cocaine in real life and it bummed me out. RIP bear.
I thought Cocaine Bear was a Marvel movie!
This is one of those incredible ouroboros headlines. Lambasting clickbait while being clickbait? Could something possibly be more on-brand for this site? Extraordinary.
Coming up next on AV Club:
25 mentions of “clickbait” by people other than us (in slideshow format).
better yet, in their crappy video player that you can’t skip around in.
You can get the video player to work?!
Even when I don’t want to! I’ll occasionally try to play a video on a browser, and no sound will come out. Eventually I’ll remember that, oh yeah, I turned off sounds in my browser because of this site’s bullshit autoplay videos.
You can turn it off on site settings for this domain.
I wish I could make it stop working.,
2 of them will say “alright, these ones are us but we called ourselves out on it because we are clever!”
Number 14 will make you shit vomit from your dick!
There’s this current of underlying self-awareness to a lot of the present-era AVClub’s clickbait that leaves me unsure if the author is rolling their eyes and laughing or barely able to see the screen through their tears.
“The clickbait is coming from inside the house!”
What if the real clickbait was the list of friends we made along the way?…and here they are in a slideshow (number 5 will amaze you)
Yeah, you’d think they would want to talk about the movie of hers that actually is coming out.
Can someone explain to me why she thinks this article would be controversial in regards to her comments about Thor? She said she thought she might get the job directing Ragnarok, but that she didn’t get it.I don’t see the controversy here? I’ve been awake for over 24 hours so maybe I’m missing something.
“Yeah, but we’re doing it ironically.”
“86 Times A.V. Club Was Even Shittier Than Buzzfeed*! (Number 53 Will Blow You Away!)“
*This week
She thought her experience would become clickbait. You won’t believe what happened next.
(clicks through 220 pages to find out)
The ideal slideshow!
Doctors hate her, but that’s unrelated.
She became clickbait with this one simple trick.
This Is The Scene That Got M.A.S.H. Cancelled!
14 times when interviews go too far. (number 17 will disturb you)
One more weight added to the sinking corpse of AVclub.
She is clickbait https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7703885/Elizabeth-Banks-slammed-claiming-men-unlikely-watch-Charlies-Angels.html
Must’ve taken hours of deep searching to find another example of clickbait on the internet.
Hold up: they got clickbait on the internet now?!?
You must have erased the news from your head when Charlie’s angels came out https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/elizabeth-banks-charlies-angels-box-office-bomb
It’s funny that three years later you’re still mad about this.
oh look no answer, thinking I am mad and not was laughing at Elizabeth Banks for being a failure.
Ah, gotcha. The vague, grammatically-challenged style of your comments seemed to imply cranky rage, but I’m realizing that’s just your default communication style.
Ahh, so you are dumb and can’t argue with me, all you can try to do is try to put me down. So you lost in this comment chain just like you do in life.
I can’t argue with you if you’re unable to express an actual point of view, ya silly goose.
Goose, I am a cat. Banks made bad movies first saying they are only for women, and when they failed saying no men wanted to see them.
And three years later it’s still chafing ya.
nope, only thing chafing me is no Bob’s burgers for a month
She tastes like a burger, I don’t like her anymore.
Did you check out her chicken wings, though?
““I can’t do someone else’s vision,” she says.”Marvel is probably a non-starter, then.
That was my thought as well. Edgar Wright walked away from Ant-Man for the same reason and I *think* Patty Jenkins walked away from Thor 2 for the same reason as well. In retrospect, it’s almost bizarre they gave Waititi so much leeway, though it did end up working out.
For a single film it worked out for Marvel. Waititi’s follow up was pretty meh.
I actually liked Love and Thunder well enough, but there were definitively diminishing returns.
I’m too lazy to try and find this, but I remember some interview that suggested the released version of Ragnarok is a recut after the Waititi-style humor in the early trailers got such a positive reception. The implication was that it was a much more standard Marvel movie until they had real world proof that the director having a personality wouldn’t put people off.
I forget who it was, but one director complained that the action scenes were halfway done before he was even hired. Marvel’s method of making movies is clearly very effective, but I can’t blame a director for not wanting to work with those constraints.
Based on Charlie’s Angels, she can’t do her own vision, either.
If the rumors are true over at DC her old buddy James Gunn may hook her up with something she can put her own spin on Ironically the reason Thor: Ragnarok worked was because they actually let Taika kinda do his thing with it. The problem is worked to well so Thor 4 was just “More of it!”
Yeah, I feel like they took some of the wrong lessons from Ragnarok. In Ragnarok, Thor was dimwitted and silly at times, but overall was still someone with skill and intelligence. People responded well to that so they decided to go with dumb Thor for all movies moving forward. In Love and Thunder, he’s basically a complete buffoon incapable of doing anything.
I think Ragnarok was really a spontaneous funny weird thing too, and trying to replicate it or expand upon was not really possible. Love and Thunder didn’t have the spark, there was nothing there. It felt so forced
Ragnarok is disarming in that Hemsworth injects more of his already-present humor (verbal and physical) into his Thor, tricking some audience members into seeing the character as a buffoon, when in reality the Thor we see in that movie is probably the most competent he’s been portrayed. He’s intelligent (mastering alien tech with ease), cunning (out-tricking Loki) and becomes a leader on his terms, not those set for him.
Vision? No, MCU scripts are clearly written by an algorithm.
Exactly. Marvel lets people pick the colors within the lines (see: Dr. Strange 2 and Winter Soldier), but they very much expect the lines to stay the same. It’s basically directing TV.
Damn.
I hadn’t seen it put in those words, but yeah, it’s TV directing.
I came to the realization a while ago that the MCU is essentially a massively budgeted television show that only drops episodes 2-3x a year.
Does anyone actually “direct” Marvel movies in anything beyond the most technical sense?
I can’t see how watching Love & Thunder or Ragnorak or any of the Guardians movies or even Eternals would lead to this question.
Somebody always yells BUT TAIKA WAITITI! JAMES GUNN! whenever it’s suggested that Marvel movies aren’t particularly visionary (however much fun you get out of them) or that every aspect of their production might be unconditionally beholden to corporate interests.
There’s no question that Gunn, Waititi, Raimi, and others have definitely put their own stamps on the films, but that was done squarely with the support and approval of Marvel. The directors were cast to fit the mold just as much as any of the actors were.
Their shtick wore massively thin with me and I’m glad they’re both gone. I just think that NO MARK NO CREATIVITY is an inaccurate criticism.
Someone’s gotta tell the actors what the guy covered in ping-pong balls is gonna look like.
And it’s the effects supervisor. But someone else has to make sure that the producers don’t fire the effects supervisor. And that’s the line producer. But someone else has to make sure that the line producer knows their Fucking Place. And that is why people go into filmmaking.
“I don’t know, man…it’s like a tentacle-y dragon-y kind of thing? The art guys are still mocking it up, but honestly this scene’s going to be so dark and chaotic that no one’s going to be able to make out anything. Just look scared I guess.”
I hope this movie breaks for her, she seems to work awfully hard. All hollywood power moves aside, I’d love to see them get the band back together and have her and Paul Rudd headline a comedy with David Wain or Michael Showalter directing.
I always imagined she’d do great making an old-school screwball comedy (maybe with a slightly updated sensibility), but I don’t know that the audience is there for screwball comedies anymore.
I think screwball comedy would still be successful (like you said, with a bit less of the old school Hollywood cheesiness). There’s just not room for comedies in the theaters anymore so it’ll end up on Netflix and everyone will forget about it in a week.
As a director, Pitch Perfect 2 already broke for her. It was a massive hit for it’s budget, which allowed her to make Charlie’s Angels, which flopped astronomically, which is a shame. Not saying her Charlie’s Angels was some fantastic movie, it’s a bit meandering, but that’s Bank’s comedic and dramatic sensibilities and the action are good, and it’s become a bit of cult classic, but Columbia and Sony wanted a McG style Charlie’s Angels. They skimped on advertising, even though they had Stewart’s fame to draw upon. They moved it to avoid that awful Terminator movie, and basically never gave it any chance anyway.And, wow, the reviews, which give you some semblance of the tenor at the time, are pretty stunning. Big publications complained that the “go girl” (their words) feminism was tired and trite by this point. While also bemoaning the lack of overt sexualization of the characters from the show, or the McG movies, while also many couching that that overt sexualization is bad but, come on, that’s what we expect. In that respect Bank’s Charlie’s Angels was way ahead of it’s time.
I like your take. Maybe I should actually watch any of those movies. I think Banks has been getting more of a handle on the drama (I didn’t like her in Seabiscuit, but Mrs. America she was good), but for me it’s that scene where she has barbecue sauce on her face and wants to make out in Wet Hot American Summer. That combination of very funny and very hot, but it needs somebody like The State people to handle it right. Damn…I kind of wish they’d cast Paul Rudd and her in the Mr. and Mrs. Smith reboot
“…it’s become a bit of cult classic”Citation needed.
They advertised the heck out of it until it opened and receipts started coming in way below expectations. It had a chance. It just got bad reviews and people didn’t want to go see it.
even though they had Stewart’s fame to draw uponIs that a thing? People know who she is, but she hasn’t had a significant hit outside of Twilight, and I’m not sure she was the draw even for those.
It’s funny though, isn’t it. Bank’s a well known, well liked acftress who directed a big success has one flop and stops getting the calls. Meanwhile, I can think of a dozen male directors who’ve made flop after flop, yup keep getting those calls.
I’m hoping it’s fun, silly, stupid and entertaining.
We had our hopes dashed with Snakes on a Plane. I’m more optimistic that Banks won’t end up with a so so film, having dropped the ball like SoaP did.
I wish it wasn’t being released in what seems like a packed release schedule for start of 2023. This film deserves to be a big hit and not lost in the crowd.
I have more hope here because the tone from the trailer is closer to enjoyable. Snakes on a Plane was too mean spirited to be fun in the end. It looked like a horror comedy and then they were like “watch the life drain out of this woman’s eyes as she chokes on her own blood, wheeee!”
This one little thing can make your story clickbait!
“How much clickbait can one article have? The answer may shock you.”
Coming to Phase 5: Cocaine Thor!
I mean they had “holy shit , I have the munchies “Thor , so why not.
He wasn’t getting high, was he? I know Stark calls him Lebowski at one point but I’m pretty sure he was just depicted as drinking too much beer.
I mean , he could be doing both things .
COCAINE DIRECTOR BANKS HIGH ON HER OWN SUPPLY THINKS SHE COULD DIRECT THOR RAGNAROK BETTER THAN PERSON OF COLOR
Liz, if there’s some way you could work in having a terrible on-set experience with someone, I believe we’ll be alllll set.
Never should have badmouthed The Beard in public.
The AVClub really missed an opportunity to turn this story into a slideshow, somehow.
Thanks for proving her right.
well Waititi was the right person for Ragnarok, but we might have been better off with Banks directing Love & Thunder. probably a lot less Korg at least
“But after well over a decade doing the interview circuit, she says she’s not all that bothered about it anymore.”
Ah yes, the person who brought up something thinking it would get viral attention isn’t bothered by the attention?
YOU DON’T FUCKING SAY…
I wanted to do the new Star Wars trilogy but they insisted on JJ and then Rian and then JJ screwing it up instead
I’m kinda ashamed to admit it, but I was really excited about Abrams directing TFA. He did a pretty good job trying to make Star Trek into Star Wars, obviously he’d be even better actually making a Star Wars movie… To be fair, he did give the audience exactly what we thought we wanted in a Star Wars sequel.
Meanwhile, Russian scientists are attempting to crack the mysteries of gerbil sociality! To explain the evolution of sociality the authors propose the hypothesis that every social interaction is based on the contest. The synergetic nature of any interaction determines the permanent involving partners in the contests and leads to increasing social pressure within community. The contestants’ interactions inhibit an activity in one of the partners. Two possible evolutionary strategies of adaptation to increasing social density are: 1) an increase in resistance to the activity inhibition; 2) a retaining in memory the results of inhibition, i.e. reducing of ability to restore inhibited activity. Three species of gerbils (Gerbillidae): Mongolian (Meriones unguiculatus), Libyan (M. libycus), and midday gerbil (M. meridianus) were compared. Being similar in their ecology and behavioural repertoire three species differ strongly in extent of sociality: the highest in Mongolian gerbil and the lowest in midday one. The duration of social acts in laboratory groups of gerbils as well as frequency of acts delaying conflicts under natural conditions were assumed to correlate with increase in resistance to social pressure. Both parameters were higher in mongolian and libyan gerbils. The data on dynamics, asymmetry, and stability of social relations indicates more stable retaining in memory the results of interactions in Mongolian and Libyan gerbils than in midday ones but the latter restore inhibited activity more quickly. In the laboratory groups where the available space is compressed the midday gerbils maintain population at a level not lower than Mongolian ones and much higher than M. libycus. Moreover aggression within the group of midday gerbils doesn’t result in rapid population decrease as in other two species.