The shorter than usual runtime for Thor: Love and Thunder is reportedly because Marvel Studios wanted it that way.
It's the shortest Marvel movie for years and some fans aren't exactly happy that they didn't get as much Thor: Love and Thunder than they were expecting.
The movie's official runtime clocks in at a tight one hour and 59 minutes, just squeaking below the two hour barrier.
That makes it the shortest Marvel movie for a long time, not since 2018's Ant Man and the Wasp has one of their superhero films failed to last for longer than two hours.
Plenty of fans were pretty sceptical before the movie's launch that it would have the time to do everything it wanted and it seems they have turned out to be right.
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Director Taika Waititi explained that deleted scenes featuring Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage and Jeff Goldblum were all cut from the final film.
Some have thought that the decision to trim down the film was Waititi's though that seems not to have been the case.
The director said he cut a number of scenes because they weren't 'good enough' and not because he wanted to bring the film in on time.
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Speaking on The Ringer-Verse podcast, Joanna Robinson explained that Thor: Love and Thunder's mandated runtime was a directive from Marvel Studios themselves.
They said: "Taika having a blank check on this is absolutely not the case.
"He got more leeway than he got with Ragnarok, but there was a mandate to bring this movie in under two hours. This comes in under two hours and they cut a ton of stuff out of this movie."
If that's the case then a lot of content has ended up on the cutting room floor, including some 'creepy as hell' scenes from Christian Bale's evil villain Gorr the God Butcher.
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The villain was apparently supposed to 'kill a bunch of other people' so perhaps some actors are thanking their lucky stars they didn't get killed off and are still riding that MCU gravy train.
It's likely that a larger cut of the movie with the extra scenes restored will probably never see the light of day, as Waititi has said he's not a fan of directors cuts.
To put it into context, of the 29 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, only seven have clocked in at under the two hour mark, and three of those movies have been standalone Thor films.
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Taika Waititi was the first director to take a standalone Thor movie beyond two hours with Thor: Ragnarok clocking in at two hours and 10 minutes.
On average an MCU movie has a runtime of two hours and 12 minutes, with the longest film being the bladder-busting Avengers: Endgame and the shortest a tie between The Incredible Hulk and Thor: The Dark World.
Thor: Love and Thunder is screening in cinemas now.
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Topics: Film and TV, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Taika Waititi
Joe Harker