MovieChat Forums > Die Hard (1988) Discussion > Could Alexander Godunov (Karl) have made...

The real question is, could a half-decent 'Thor' movie have been made when Alexander Godunov was a little more alive? The answer is 'no'; although film critics point to 'Superman' (1978) as the genesis of the modern superhero film, the genre really did not begin to prosper until Tim Burton's 'Batman' (1989), by which time Godunov was already forty years old. One might ask the same question about a hundred other dead Hollywood actors with blonde hair and funny accents. But why stop there? What about Troy Donahue? Or James Dean? Or Errol Flynn, for that matter? What if the superhero genre were established in Hollywood in the 1960s? Or the 50s? Or earlier? Godunov himself would likely not have been interested, unless there were an established pattern for such films. He had the wrong body, and although he kept himself in good shape, his physique was too tall and too light for such a role. His appearance in 'Die Hard' is anomalous, since he didn't much care for action films; but then again he is a relatively minor character, and his final scene is clearly lifted from that of the Queen Alien in 'Aliens' (1986), complete with an unused chunk of James Horner's musical score for that film. We must also remember Godunov had a fairly successful career as a ballet dancer, then decided to defect, thinking he would be the next Mikhail Baryshnikov... and that just didn't work out, as the west had already tired of ballet. So acting was a second choice at best, one the actor was chiefly interested in for money, and publicity. Godunov continued to ply his acting career, appearing in a variety of quirky roles... and then he was dead. And that was a quarter of a century ago.

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"He had the wrong body..."

That's true. Godunov had a perfectly proportioned, lean, muscular body developed over many years of careful ballet training with the goal of a superhuman level of coordination and agility. To play Thor in modern comic book movies, an actor needs the type of grotesquely bulky but athletically useless body created by steroids and many hours on weight machines.

"The west had already tired of ballet."

The West hadn't tired of ballet. Ballet was never just a Russian (Soviet) thing. It remains as popular in the West as it ever was. What happened was that after the defections of Nureyev in the early '60s and Baryshnikov in the early '70s, the general public, that doesn't normally pay much attention to ballet anyway, lost interest in sensational defections and moved on to other things. Not only that, but Godunov, as good a dancer as he was, was no Nureyev or Baryshnikov, and wouldn't have garnered the same level of attention even if he had defected years earlier.

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