By: Russ Burlingame on December 28, 2011
After rumors that co-star Natalie Portman was upset about the firing of Patty Jenkins , it was suggested by some that Marvel Studios would do well to replace the outgoing director with another woman. Jenkins had, after all, been the first female director ever hired to direct a major superhero franchise film. Instead, Deadline reported late last week that it appears as though she will be succeeded as the director of Thor 2 by Alan Taylor, whose last successful film was 1995′s Palookaville, but whose long TV resume includes such genre hits as Game of Thrones, the recently-canceled Bored to Death and Lost.
The first Thor film, directed this year by Kenneth Branagh, grossed nearly $500 Million worldwide and was met with widely positive reviews, even while many mainstream critics complain
ed about a summer in which four major studio tentpole films (Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, X-Men: First Class and Green Lantern) were based on superhero comics.
The film will hit theaters in November of 2013, one of the first Marvel movies set to be released on the heels of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, which comes to theaters this summer. Marvel has hinted that some new characters will start to populate its movie universe in the wake of The Avengers, and have told fans that Iron Man 3, set to hit theaters six months before Thor 2, will touch off a new story that will connect the Marvel movie universe in much the same way that Nick Fury and Agent Coulson’s S.H.I.E.L.D. recruitment drive did with the previous spate of Marvel Studios films.
