After the climactic events of the Infinity Saga, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and Natasha Romanoff are all gone, and Clint Barton appears to be returning to superhero retirement after Hawkeye. We’ll learn more about what Bruce Banner has been up to when he joins his cousin in the upcoming Disney+ series She-Hulk, but from the original group of Avengers who first teamed up to fend off Loki and his alien invasion in 2012 , only Thor Odinson is still front and center in the MCU. When Thor: Love and Thunder is released on Friday, the God of Thunder will be back.
While much of the old guard of MCU franchise stars have moved on (at least for now), Chris Hemsworth returns as Thor for an unprecedented fourth solo film. After making his MCU debut with the awesome Thor: Ragnarok in 2017, director Taika Waititi is also back at the helm, lending his voice to Thor’s rock friend Korg. Tessa Thompson also reprises her role as Valkyrie, and for the first time since 2013’s Thor: The Dark World, Natalie Portman returns as Dr. Jane Foster.
Along with familiar faces from past Thor films, Love and Thunder will also feature a host of new gods, including Zeus (played by Russell Crowe) and a looming threat that seeks to end the gods’ near-immortal existence, Horus the Butcher God (Christian Bale). It’s been a few years since we’ve seen the self-proclaimed mightiest Avenger in action, so ahead of the release of Love and Thunder, here’s a refresher on where we left off with Thor and Jane, as well as a little background on the comics that inspired the film. (Note: There won’t be any spoilers below for Love and Thunder, or at least nothing beyond what’s already been revealed in the movie’s trailers, but everything else that comes before it in the MCU and in the comics it’s adapted from is fair game.)
The Adventures of Thor
Love and Thunder marks Hemsworth’s eighth (!) film appearance as the God of Thunder (not counting a mid-credits Doctor Strange scene), and a lot has happened to the Asgardian in all that screen time. He began as an arrogant, petulant prince whose desire for the throne was surpassed only by his thirst for war, and he became a worthy hero who realized he was not fit to be king. He has saved Earth multiple times since he was first exiled there without his god powers or Mjolnir hammer, and he has beheaded the infamous Thanos (after failing the first time).
But Thor’s story in the MCU can be defined as much by everything he’s lost as by his accomplishments and how he’s grown as a character. First, it was his mother in the battle against Malekith the Cursed in the Dark World. His father then turned into cosmic dust in Ragnarok. Then his mischievous brother died – for the third time – in Infinity War. By now, Thor has lost almost everything he started with in 2011’s Thor, as most of his closest Asgardian friends—Heimdall and the Three Warriors—were killed by either Hela, the Asgardian goddess of death, or Thanos. (Thor even lost his magnificent hair for a while starting in Ragnarok, but it grew back during that dark period in Endgame where all he did was drink beer and play video games with Korg.) Asgard was also destroyed, with all that is left of its people and culture now existing in the piece of land on Earth called New Asgard.
Heading to Love and Thunder, Thor has handed over the rule of New Asgard to King Valkyrie and decided to return to space with Korg and his new friends, the Guardians of the Galaxy. Thor still wields his enchanted axe, Stormbreaker, after Hela destroyed his trusty hammer in Ragnarok, even if he was able to borrow a version of Mjolnir from a previous timeline in Endgame. (Captain America seems to have taken him back to where he came from, but the specifics of that situation are still a little hazy, as is often the case with matters of time travel.) Perhaps most of all, Thor’s next chapter now finds him without a purpose. After countless years of battling dark elves, ice giants, and every living creature in between, the god is ready to embrace change. “These hands were once used for fighting,” he says as the first Love and Thunder trailer opens. “Now they are only humble instruments of peace. I need to find out exactly who I am.
The Return of Jane Foster
Although Dr. Foster made a brief appearance in Endgame, in which unused footage from The Dark World was recycled along with a new voiceover from Portman, Love and Thunder marks the first time Portman has portrayed Foster in earnest in nearly a decade. And this time, she gets to play a version of the character who is much more than a damsel in distress or the one forever stuck waiting for the God of Thunder to return to Earth. “I’ve seen her play a scientist in Thor 1 and 2, and it just seemed like a no-brainer to do it again,” Waititi said of Portman’s astrophysics in a recent interview with Variety. “This character just seems like a love interest. It’s an Earth woman running around being mortal and not really relevant all the time.”
Instead, Portman now takes on the role of the Mighty Thor himself.
In Phase 4, there were several instances of new characters or those who were in smaller roles taking up the mantle of one of the original Avengers, such as newcomers Elena Belova in Black Widow and Kate Bishop in Hawkeye, or Sam Wilson in The Falcon and the winter soldier. And besides all the passing of the torch, the multiverse has also allowed multiple versions of a character to appear on screen at the same time, including in Loki, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. With the sole exception of Kate teaming up with Clint Barton in Hawkeye, what separates the appearance of the all-new Thor in Love and Thunder from these other Phase 4 projects is that the original character isn’t dead (or potentially hiding on the moon). and Jane doesn’t arrive from an alternate universe. In Love and Thunder, Odin’s son is no longer the only one worthy of wielding the hammer.
During Jason Aaron and Russell Dauterman’s 2014 Thor run, Jane takes Mjolnir to transform into the Goddess of Thunder after Thor is temporarily unable to do so on his own. There is a bit of a learning curve for Jane in her new line of work, and an even longer adjustment period for some Asgardians to accept her as the new Thor; Odinson, for his part, mourns his lost weapon, having been hit in several bars in the Nine Realms. But Foster makes the legendary title his own over time, earning the respect of his pious colleagues as he learns to wield Thor’s famed weapon in deadly new ways.
Images via Marvel Comics
As Jane gains the power of the Mighty Thor, the sudden gift comes at a great price. Before she had this ability to turn into a god on a whim, she battled breast cancer. Transforming into Thor clears the disease from her body every time she transforms, but also neutralizes her chemotherapy treatment. In other words, being Thor saves Jane every time she goes into battle, but slowly kills her in the process, weakening her body every time she returns to her mortal form.
To prepare for her role as the new Goddess of Thunder in Love and Thunder, Portman transformed her body into superhero form through an intense 10-month training program, and the results are undeniable: Jane was totally smitten. “On Black Swan I was asked to go as small as possible,” Portman told Variety. “Here they asked me to get as big as possible. It’s an incredible challenge and also a state of mind as a woman.
As for Jane’s cancer storyline from the comics, fans have wondered if Foster’s MCU version would face the same affliction ever since Portman’s return to the franchise was announced in 2019. Both Portman and Waititi offered the standard cautious responses, that come with every spoiler-laden question ahead of the release of a Marvel movie, though the Love and Thunder director’s answers were a bit more revealing than his actor’s. “Part of why [Portman] wanted to play this character is that she has a dilemma in the book,” Waititi explained to Variety, before appearing to weigh his next words more carefully. “Am I allowed to talk about it?”
The butcher is coming
Ten years after Christian Bale donned the hood for the last time in The Dark Knight Rises, the 48-year-old English actor is returning to superhero movies. Since Batman didn’t die at the end of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, guess who lived long enough to become a villain? In Love and Thunder, Bale joins the MCU to become Thor’s great villain from the comics: Gorr the God Butcher.
Thor has existed in the pages of Marvel Comics since the early 1960s, facing off against villains like Loki, the Destroyer, Malekith, and Hela time and again in the years since. All four characters appeared in the first three Thor movies, but Gore is a relative newcomer. The God Butcher’s comic debut came just a decade ago, during a stellar storyline created by Aaron and artist Esad Ribic in 2012’s Thor: God of Thunder.
In the comics, Gor is born on a harsh, unnamed planet where his people suffer from hunger and an unforgiving sun from the day they are born until the day they die. Despite their ungrateful way of life, they still worshiped the gods and offered them what little they had, even when their prayers went unanswered. Gor’s belief in the divine diminished with each death in his family until he no longer believed the gods existed at all. When he finally found out…
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