20 Fails That Nearly Killed The Marvel Film Universe

19. Thor Was Originally Planned As A TV Movie

The idea of a Thor movie had been kicking around for a long, long time before it actually came to fruition: Sam Raimi had been shopping the idea to studios since the early 1990s, though after gaining little traction it was subsequently abandoned for a number of years. With X-Men's surprise box office success in 2000, the idea was for Thor to be a TV movie to be aired on UPN, and Tyler Mane (who played Sabretooth in X-Men) was in line to play the long-haired Asgardian. However, the project stalled for years, and eventually, Paramount helped Marvel Studios create and release the Chris Hemsworth-starring Thor in cinemas worldwide. Why It Would've Ruined The MCU: If a Thor movie had been released straight-to-TV, it may have simply been enough to put audiences off the character for good if it had sucked. If the movie had been made and bombed, would Marvel have then had to try and get another movie made for theatrical release? And if enough people had seen a potentially terrible Thor TV movie, would they have even bothered to go see the theatrical "reboot"? Even if the movie had been good under the budgetary constraints of TV and the question mark of Tyler Mane's casting, it would've ultimately put Marvel Studios in an awkward position: would they have just introduced Mane into the MCU in The Avengers, or would they have recast him and told a whole new Thor origin story? We're glad they opted for a big-budget blockbuster to introduce audiences to Thor: it worked, and that's that.