Tai­ka Waititi’s next film will be an inspi­ra­tional foot­ball epic

Every­one in Hol­ly­wood wants a piece of Tai­ka Wait­i­ti. The Mar­vel-indus­tri­al com­plex land­ed a new gold­en boy by tap­ping the New Zealan­der for the third Thor film, and they’ll soon bring him back for the fourth install­ment of the fran­chise, sub­ti­tled Love and Thunder.

Seem­ing­ly oper­at­ing under the ​“one for them, one for me” prin­ci­ple, Waititi’s also main­tained a pres­ence in the indie-cin­e­ma sphere by part­ner­ing with Fox Search­light. They’ll soon bring his anti-Nazi satire Jojo Rab­bit to the­aters, and late last night, Vari­ety broke the news that they’ll rep­re­sent his next film as well.

That project would be Next Goal Wins, a drama­ti­za­tion of a doc­u­men­tary about Dutch foot­ball coach Thomas Ron­gen, who whipped 2011’s Amer­i­can Samoa team into shape — zeroes to heroes, uplift­ing train­ing mon­tages, you get the gen­er­al idea. Ron­gen guid­ed them to their first-ever vic­to­ry against Tonga’s team, and helped to bridge their cul­tur­al bound­aries through the uni­fy­ing pow­er of the game, whether known as foot­ball or soccer.

The arti­cles spec­i­fies that Wait­i­ti (who first got ahold of the script after he was giv­en a copy by Andy Serkis) will dig in on Next Goal Wins before start­ing work on Thor: Love and Thun­der, and that shoot­ing will get going this fall. That leaves the ques­tion of cast­ing, how­ev­er; whether Wait­i­ti will sit this one out or save him­self a role has yet to be revealed.

Wait­i­ti com­mands an envi­able spot in the indus­try right now, with the cachet and dis­tinc­tion to get orig­i­nal-con­cept films made with healthy bud­gets and note­wor­thy tal­ent. That he con­tin­ues to use his pow­ers for good, alter­nat­ing the stu­dio tent­poles with more off-the-beat­en-path mate­r­i­al, is a ton­ic in these times of con­glom­er­a­tion and homogeneity.