THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER

A fresh face for asgard’s storm-bringer…

DIRECTOR TAIKA WAITITI STARRING CHRIS HEMSWORTH, NATALIE PORTMAN, TESSA THOMPSON ETA 5 NOVEMBER 2021

For the first time in a thousand years,” said Endgame’s

Thor, “I have no path.” For the first time in 10 years of MCU films, more changes still await old thunder-pants. Bringing all due pomp to the MCU’s first solo-headliner fourquel, Thor will have a Mighty prefix. And she’ll be played by Natalie Portman, aka Jane Foster.

“I’ve always had a little hammer envy,” quipped Portman, banking those innuendos as she joined co-stars Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson at Comic-Con. After Ragnarok’s Carry On Mjölnir corkers, we’ll surely hear more of such if returning director Taika Waititi follows Thor’s (Hemsworth variety) newfound struggle to achieve hammer-y uplift. In Jason Aaron’s comics arc The Mighty Thor, Mjölnir found a new carrier in Thor’s “old flame”, glimpsed in Endgame but last given a full MCU outing in The Dark World.

Inspiration hit Waititi while making Ragnarok, when he read Aaron’s story and fell for its grand reserves of “emotion and love and thunder”. In short, think beyond the innuendo. In Aaron’s ambitious telling, Foster/Thor faces breast cancer – and it worsens whenever she lifts Mjölnir.

Whether or not Waititi intends to honour that angle

(we hope he does), he proved he could shake up Thor lore successfully in Ragnarok. Kevin Feige, meanwhile, is surely honouring his bid to shake up the post-Stark MCU. “This is a very big movie,” says Feige, “that’ll be folding in a lot of elements.” And the more off the beaten path it goes, the better.