Taika Waititi is really ready for you to buy into the Taikaverse
It’s been a busy year for Taika Waititi. As an in-demand producer, he’s had a lot of projects hit screens in 2023, including season 2 of Our Flag Means Death (which he starred in as well as producing), season 3 of Reservation Dogs, season 5 of What We Do in the Shadows, and the indie films Frybread Face and Me and Red, White & Brass. As a writer and director, he’s midstream on Apple TV Plus’ reboot of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, with irons in the fire on everything from a Star Wars movie to a series adaptation of Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. And on top of it all, he has a new movie in theaters: Next Goal Wins, a sports comedy adapting the documentary of the same name about the real-life comeback of the American Samoa soccer team, after a record-breaking 31-0 World Cup qualifier loss.
Next Goal Wins is a bit of an oddity, as Waititi’s films tend to be. It’s an underdog-sports-team story that subverts the genre by suggesting its team isn’t actually good enough to compete on a major level: The players would be content to score a single goal, ever. The real-life events had Dutch coach Thomas Rongen (played in Waititi’s movie by Michael Fassbender) helping the Samoan team turn things around, but Waititi consciously avoids a white-savior narrative by turning Rongen into a disaster of a man who needs help more than he’s offering it.
And like so much of Waititi’s comedy, the film centers on self-effacing losers who operate with unearned pride — but this time out, the conventions of sports dramas require them to work for their self-esteem, too. Polygon talked to Waititi ahead of the movie’s release about its strange framing, its easygoing vibe, and above all, its place in “the Taikaverse” — Waititi’s running-gag name for
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