I, like GeekTyrant, am not entirely certain that I believe this story:
According to [Director Taika Waititi], 80 percent of Thor: Ragnarok was improvised, or ad-libbed.
“My style of working is I’ll often be behind the camera, or right next to the camera yelling words at people, like, ‘Say this, say this! Say it this way!'” he said. “I’ll straight-up give Anthony Hopkins a line reading. I don’t care.”
Although I do have to admit: if you had told me that Disney would let the Rogue One team get away with what they got away with I would have had precisely the same skepticism. I have to remember sometimes that at this point stuff like Star Wars and the MCU are established properties with plenty of room for errors and experimentation. The studio is unlikely to take a bath on the latest Thor movie, to put it mildly; and since it’s a minor piece of the MCU they can afford to shake things up a little. People are still going to go see it because it’s gonna have Thor and Hulk and Dr. Strange maybe and definitely Loki, after all — and because seeing all the movies helps you keep track of the big ones.
So, hey, maybe this is gonna be awesome.
Improve can be a double-edge sword in movies. It rests on the director to make it work. That said, MCU has earn some leeway.
.
On a related note, I finally saw Spider-Man: Homecoming and it was amazing. I’m hoping that Fox takes a long look at the Sony/Disney backrub and wants in on that with their upcoming Dr. Doom movie. You never know, just left the Avengers’ building. Maybe someone else will move in…
From your lips to God’s ears.
Can be done with the right people. In Scrubs, Neil Flynn’s improv as The Janitor was so on point the script often read “whatever Neil comes up with.”
IIRC, a lot of RDJ’s best stuff as Tony Stark is ad-lib and improvised.