Celebrity
How A Taylor Swift Meme Influenced Thor: Love And Thunder
"Now I'm lying on the cold hard ground."
If you’re a Swiftie and a Marvel Cinematic Universe stan, you probably already know that Taylor Swift has multiple (mostly accidental) connections to the superhero franchise. Namely, Jake Gyllenhaal, Harry Styles, and Tom Hiddleston — three of Swift’s high-profile exes — have starred in Marvel movies as Mysterio, Starfox, and Loki, respectively. But now, with Thor: Love and Thunder, Swift’s music is making a mark on the MCU, too.
No, unfortunately, you won’t catch “Blank Space” or any other Swiftie bops on the Love and Thunder soundtrack (you will hear ABBA and lots of Guns N’ Roses, though). Swift’s influence on the film actually comes by way of a resurfaced meme based on her 2012 single, “I Knew You Were Trouble.” You know the one — where the chorus is interspersed with clips of screaming goats?
The audio gag from a simpler time made its way to the Love and Thunder cutting room and ultimately inspired the vocals of the movie’s screaming goats, director Taika Waititi revealed in a July 11 interview with Insider.
“They were never meant to be screaming,” Waititi clarified. “The goats were always going to be in there because they are in the comics, but we didn't know how they would sound. Then someone in post-production found this meme of a Taylor Swift song that has screaming goats in it. I didn't even know that existed. So I hear the screaming goats and I just felt it was awesome. A lot of people think it's me screaming. It's not.”
Waititi added that the vendors who designed the goats actually used the meme’s audio in “a shot of how the CG creatures were coming along,” just for fun — not for the film’s final cut. But alas, Waititi said the result was “freakin’ awesome” and decided to include it anyway.
Interestingly, the goat meme isn’t the only Swiftie connection in Love and Thunder. The film’s co-writer, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, actually made her feature film debut with Netflix’s Someone Great, which was inspired in part by Swift’s 1989 moving on anthem, “Clean,” Robinson explained on Instagram, praising the song’s themes of “rebirth after love lost.”
So even though Swift’s music doesn’t explicitly appear in Love and Thunder, the spiritual connection is definitely there. Another summer movie though, Where the Crawdads Sing, does, indeed, feature a song from the hitmaker: the spooky “Carolina,” which Swift penned specifically for the film.
