Thor: Love And Thunder Photo: Marvel Studios
There are a bewildering number of complex metrics that economists, sociologists, psychologists, and other “How are people?”-ologists have used over the years to determine the health of a society: life expectancy, GDP, how many people are killed in a global pandemic each year , how close the country is to sliding into autocratic fascism, etc. But – to be perfectly honest – many of these metrics have the fundamental flaw of being a total and utter nuisance. That’s why we here at The AV Club’s Newswire desk have now invented our own measurement of the health of a functioning democracy: The Mjolnir Index, aka “How much money the latest Thor movie made at the box office compared to other movies from the franchise?” And honey, from that point of view, we’re looking at nothing but up, up, up!
The film in question is, of course, Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder , which despite receiving a rather poor reception from critics in recent weeks (and despite raging reports of new variants of COVID, no, that’s the bad indicator, think just for the hammers) , is expected to have the best opening weekend of any Thor movie.
This is, of course, a slightly skewed ranking: The first two Kenneth Branagh-directed Thors weren’t exactly barnstormers when they hit theaters in 2011 and 2013, bringing in just $65 million (Thor) and $85 million ( The Dark World) on their opening weekends. Waititi’s own Ragnarok, generally considered the best of the films, fared much better in 2017, notching $122 million in its opening weekend. But “Love and Thunder” is expected to top even that, according to THR: Even at Disney’s more conservative estimates, Waititi’s film will likely bring in at least $135 million this weekend, making it the top grosser of Thor until the moment and it will be confirmed once and for all that everything is fine, just fine, things can’t go wrong if the Hammer Man movies are still making so much money. We repeat this to each other. We repeat this to ourselves until repetition makes it true.
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