Thor 4 Director Reveals Screaming Goats Were Inspired by Taylor Swift Meme: 'It Was Awesome'

Jasin Boland/Marvel Studios, Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty

Thor: Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi found an unlikely source of inspiration for the voices of Thor's screaming goats in an old Taylor Swift meme.

Waititi, 46, told Insider Monday that the pair of goats, who Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Korg (Waititi) are gifted from a group of aliens they've helped in battle, were not originally meant to scream incessantly.

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"The goats were always going to be in there because they are in the comics, but we didn't know how they would sound," Waiti told Insider.

Waititi went on to explain that a post-production employee on the film rediscovered a popular 2013 meme featuring a goat's screams during the chorus of 32-year-old Swift's 2012 single "I Knew You Were Trouble." One video featuring the joke, originally posted to YouTube in 2013, has more than 5.7 million views on YouTube.

"I didn't even know that existed," Waititi told Insider of the screaming goat joke. "So I hear the screaming goats and I just felt it was awesome. A lot of people think it's me screaming [in the movie]. It's not."

Waititi said that a vendor hired to create the computer-generated goats for the movie added the sounds to go along with an update to the goats' creation; he told Insider that he and the Thor: Love and Thunder production team thought it was funny enough to include in the film's final cut.

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"So it was just a shot of how the CG creatures were coming along, it wasn't meant for the film or anything, it was just an update," Waititi said. "And the screams were freakin' awesome."

Thor: Love and Thunder earned $143 million across the United States in its opening weekend, according to data from Box Office Mojo. The film also earned $159 million in movie theaters internationally, bringing its global total to $302 million.

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The fourth Thor film's opening weekend box office performance put it directly behind Marvel Studios' May release Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Universal's Jurassic World: Dominion, as the third-best opening weekend for a film in 2022, according to Variety. The new film follows Thor after the events of Avengers: Endgame, as he sets on a quest for "inner peace," per the official logline from Marvel.

Along the way, he interacts with some familiar faces, including King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), Korg (Taika Waititi) and his ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who is now wielding Thor's legendary hammer Mjolnir.

The film also features Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher, a galactic killer who poses a threat to Thor and his friends.

Thor: Love and Thunder is now playing in theaters.