Phase Four · Multiverse Saga
Thor: Love and Thunder
Thor seeks inner peace, but a galactic killer named Gorr forces him back into action.
Two scenes during the credits
Availability changes by country and by week, so this searches JustWatch rather than guessing.
Can you skip Thor: Love and Thunder?
Yes, on a first watch. It is self-contained, and nothing in the main MCU story depends on it. What it does leave behind is two scenes during the credits. In chronological order, reaching it takes about 48h 44m of essential viewing across 27 titles. Show only the MCU essentials.
Skippable, and it is the clearest case in the franchise of a successful approach applied without discipline. Ragnarok worked because its comedy was placed inside a story with real losses; this is the same register with the losses treated as material for jokes.
The film it keeps interrupting is genuinely good. Christian Bale's Gorr is a believer whose child dies while he prays, who meets his god and finds him contemptuous, and who decides to kill every deity in the universe. That is the best villain premise Marvel has had, and he is given perhaps twenty minutes.
The other film is screaming goats, a comedy subplot about two rock creatures, Russell Crowe as Zeus doing a voice, and an extended gag about a jealous axe. Several sequences are plainly improvised past the point of usefulness.
The sequence in the Shadow Realm, shot in black and white, is the best-looking thing in Phase Four and suggests what the film could have been. Natalie Portman's return is given a serious arc that the surrounding tone keeps undercutting. Nothing after it depends on it.
MCU guides
Where it sits in the MCU order
- Release order
- #36 of 80
- Chronological order
- #37 of 80
- Released
- 8 July 2022
- In-universe era
- The Multiverse Cracks
What to watch next
In release order
In chronological order