Kat Dennings doesn't think she'll show up in Thor: Love And Thunder
Aux Features Fictional characters
We’ve been largely Marvel-less since Avengers: Endgame, and despite the bonkers number of MCU characters in that film, we’ve been Darcy-less for even longer. Both factors have only increased the enjoyment of WandaVision, the first of Marvel’s many new Disney+ original series, and its wackiest project yet. On the fourth and most recent episode of the sitcom- and reality-bending series, Kat Dennings’ Darcy Lewis—who first appeared in the original Thor, released a whole-ass decade ago—made her return, reprising her role for the first time since Thor: The Dark World. Darcy is now a full-fledged doctor of astrophysics, brought in alongside S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) and some other science experts to figure out what the hell is going on in the small town of Westfield—where Wanda/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) has apparently warped reality into a series of classic TV sitcom send-ups in which Vision (Paul Bettany) is still alive.
Dennings’ return to the MCU is a pleasant surprise that has some fans wondering if Darcy might also return to Thor’s corner of the universe in the upcoming Thor: Love And Thunder. Speaking with IGN, Dennings seemed doubtful, noting that the sequel from Ragnarok director Taika Waititi is currently in production and… she’s not there. “Well, I have not gotten a call so I kind of doubt it since they’re shooting it right now so probably not,” Dennings said. With Darcy’s unexpected return in WandaVision, it seems possible she could pop up elsewhere in the MCU, and Dennings is down, adding, “anything Marvel ever asks of me the answer’s always yes.”
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Possibly unpopular opinion, but while the first two Thor movies were bad, Darcy was the worst part. Especially the second, where they gave Darcy, who was a sidekick, a sidekick. Her scenes were unwatchable, though that describes so much of that film.
I have a more favorable opinion of the first one, but the second one was horrible. It is by far my least favorite Marvel movie, and I think it’s their weakest overall. The script is bad, in large part because it insists on shoving ancillary characters from Thor 1 back into it as some kind of bizarre fan service that nobody asked for. Were people clamoring for more Darcy or more Selvig? I don’t really think so. I wouldn’t have objected to having Darcy make a few sarcastic comments from the periphery, but man, she got a ton of screen time in Thor 2, including a whole sub-plot with her weird intern guy. Thor 2 was a mess. Waititi saved that particular branch on the Marvel tree, for sure. Someday I hope there’s an oral history or podcast or something about how the script for Thor 2 came to be such an unmitigated mess. Too many people got their hands on that script, and it shows.
Unrelated, kind-of, but since I went through this recently I thought I’d bring it up here: I hated that whole “Thor is fat and directionless now” thing that was apparently a hit with other people. I get the premise from a screenwriting standpoint, I guess, I just thought it was stupid and irritating.I love Kat though. I’ll watch her do anything.
I like Kat Dennings, too. I just think there’s a point at which you pull the plug on a character who doesn’t have anywhere else to grow. I am 100% with you on the Fat Thor thing. I didn’t care for it either, in part because it seemed hackneyed and in part because I didn’t feel like the script needed it. I hate it when fatness becomes visual shorthand for a character who has given up. It’s lazy writing, and Marvel could have done so much better.
Darcy was useless in Thor 2, I agree. But nowhere to grow? She’s gone from sidekick to doctor of astrophysics (nothing against poli-sci…) and is suddenly running the show on WandaVision.
I’ve haven’t seen WandaVision yet, so I can’t really speak to that. But in regard to the rest of the Marvel pantheon, yeah, she didn’t really have much to do or many places to grown in the films themselves. She’s definitely not a core character or someone who needs a lot of screen time in the film universe. Maybe there’s a place for Darcy to develop in a show like WandaVision rather than in the movies, and that’s great. But in the grand scheme of things prior to WandaVision, she’s a non-Avenger in the Avengers film franchises, so not exactly a character that we need to have dynamic plot arcs.
I liked it at first but I feel like the joke had worn out its welcome by the time the Time Heist started, but then they kept it going all the way up until the Thanos fight, which was way too much.
I had a coworker who hated that plotline as well, though his argument was “Thor isn’t supposed to be sad.” So you’re in…company.
You may watch her wait tables and relentlessly mock a little Asian man.
OK MAN!…I will.
“I love Kat though. I’ll watch her do anything.”I used to think the same thing, but I can’t handle more than 5 minutes of Two Broke Girls.
This is the way I’m stupid:For some reason I always want to call the show “Two Drunk Girls” and then have to remind myself that’s not the name.Only thing I can suss out is maybe I’m thinking “They have no money. And the reason they have no money is due to their crippling addiction to alcohol.”That said, never seen an episode of it.
Fuck that show was terrible.
It’s infuriating because it basically rehashed the story and character arc of Thor 3, just… more juvenile. One thing I didn’t like with what the Russos did after The Winter Soldier was how they keep ignoring some stuff that’s been established, sometimes—somehow—even in the same movie. Maybe that’s intentional and they know most of their audience would have the attention span of a toddler, but it made me hate some parts of their MCU stuff.
“One thing I didn’t like with what the Russos did after The Winter Soldier was how they keep ignoring some stuff that’s been established”I found it very annoying how Thor had all this character development in Ragnarok – he lost his eye but was ok it with, he lost his hammer but learned he didn’t need it – and then in the very next Russo brothers movie they gave him back his eye and a new weapon.Similar to Spider-Man in Homecoming. However much that film got the character of Peter Parker wrong, at least the ending showed promise – Peter told Tony that he didn’t want to be an Avenger, he didn’t want a Spidey suit from Tony – he looked like he could be on his way to being his own hero independent from Tony Stark. Then in the very next Russo brothers movie all of that development is erased by putting him back into a Stark-designed Spidey suit and having him be desperate for Tony’s approval again.For all the great things the Russo brothers did, they seemed to ignore a lot of character development that had already happened in the heroes’ own franchises.
Agreed. I’d add Age of Ultron to that list. A lot of development in AoU for Cap, Tony, and Banner, that got thrown out the window come Civil War and Infinity War.In AoU, they were setting up Cap as a guy who found a place with the Avengers, the “soldier without a war”. Then in Civil War he threw it all away for Bucky, and his teammates paid the cost.Tony, who knew the kind of threat that’s coming and also had been established as anti-government, suddenly wanted to play nice with them, ignoring that his own attempt at oversight failed with Ultron.AoU fleshed out Banner’s inner struggle and self-loathing, and I get why Ragnarok didn’t immediately follow that up, though it did a good job separating Hulk and Banner as two different personas. But come Infinity War and Endgame, his character arc just stopped and when it started back up, he’s Smart Hulk and all is hunky-dory.These three points stuck out the most for me, since even with AoU’s flaws, I thought it did a good job moving these characters forward in their development.
The thing I feel is off about fat Thor is that no one except maybe his mom seemed worried about the fact that Thor was broken and truly depressed. People just kept taking jabs.Fat Thor in general, I like in terms of what it represented. He’s lost his mother, father, brother, home, best friends and he might if been able to save the world if struck Thor in the right place. He was emotionally and physically gone. It’s something that works better on rewatch. It’s easy to get caught up in the silly part of it all but when you see how low he is by infinity war, it makes sense. Also, in battle he’s still Thor. I know Hemsworth is not actually obese but you don’t get to see obese people kick ass in movies very often.
Thor wasn’t just fat for no reason.
He is a literal Aryan god now displayed as flawed, broken, with massive amounts of depression…. and just as vulnerable as the rest of us.
Yeah…I get that. Considering I am fat, flawed, and broken; suffering from depression as well. I just didn’t have as far to fall I suppose.Of course, I would have interpreted the role completely differently 🙂
Really need her in the Agents of SWORD show.
I don’t think I’ve posted this here before, but here’s my meta-rankings of all the MCU movies. About the time Spider-Man: Far From Home came out, many websites came out with their ranked lists of all the MCU films. I took 20 of those lists that came up on Google searches and combined their rankings into one meta-ranking chart, and this is what resulted
Sources: Business Insider, CinemaBlend, Collinder, Complex, Empire, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Games Radar, Independent, Polygon, Screen Crush, Screen Rant, Slant, Studio Bin, Thrilist, Uproxx, Variety, Vox, Wired, The Wrap.
Method: Films are assigned points based on their position inthe rankings: (1) 225, (2) 196, (3) 169, (4) 144, (5) 121, (6) 100, (7) 81, (8) 64, (9) 49, (10) 36, (11) 25, (12) 16, (13) 9, (14) 4, (15) 1, (16) -1, (17) -4, (18) -9, (19) -16, (20) -25, (21) -36, (22) -49, (23) -64. The points are then averaged and renormalized such that the lowest rank film has 0 points. I used this scale to give the films appearing at the top or bottom of lists greater separation than those appearing in the squishy center of rankings. But for the MCU, which most people agree has had more good films than stinkers, I placed that squishy center about 2/3rds down any ranked list.
I’m not saying this in any way definitive, but it’s an interesting way to look at popular opinion.
I love this! And I largely agree with the general position of things. Black Panther and the Winter Soldier and Ragnarok are in a class of their own, in my opinion. Not sure I would put Guardians Vol. 1 so high, but it would definitely fall onto the “Good” side of things if I were to break the Marvel movies into Great/Good/OK/Bad categories. I liked Thor more than most people did, apparently. I thought it was a solid origin story and so I would consider it Good to OK. But Thor: Dark World, Iron Man 2, and Ultron are all bad, bad movies. I had forgotten that The Incredible Hulk even existed, so it probably deserves its spot at the bottom.
I like to imagine that Thor 2 started out as a treatment for Doctor Who (hence the heavier sci-fi leanings, the focus on London and Stonehenge, and Christopher Eccleston). Then they just took out the Doctor and put in a cheerful super-strong jock with a hammer.
What’s more likely: they saw what critics liked of the first movie (Kat Dennings is funny! I wish we were on Asgard more!) and then gave people more of all of those things … to which the critics all responded “no not like that.” Personally, I like the Thor/Loki moments, but pretty much everything else is forgettable. Asgard is no longer a lifeless CGI shell like in the first movie, but it also loses a bit of grandeur. The Warriors Three and the human supporting characters are all forced to compete for screen time, leaving all of them with nothing to do. And Malekith has got to be THE most boring and pointless villain with THE most generic doomsday plan – almost none of which is spoken in a language we can understand.
Malekith is a waste of the sublime Christopher Eccleston, for which Marvel should be ashamed. You’re absolutely right that Thor 2 basically got focus-grouped to death. Loki was a breakout character, but there were not plans for him to play a part in Thor 2. But he got shoved in (and I agree those were some of the more enjoyable parts of the film) at the expense of developing the main plot and villain. Overall, there is just a lot of noise in Thor 2 that gets in the way of it actually telling a story.
Put me down for liking the first Thor, especially the fish out of water stuff.
I’m with you on that one, and I liked how bright and colourful it was, and have always been confused by the kicking it’s got in recent years after initially receiving mostly positive reviews.
My favorite of the Thors and among my favorite Marvels. Ragnarok is great but bloated.
Thor 1 was fine. They hadn’t quite cracked the character yet but as an introduction to some of the more outlandish parts of the MCU Branagh and co did a reasonable job.
Think the backlash was mostly a bit of revisionism after Thor 2 came out. If enough people repeat nonsense then it eventually becomes accepted truth.
I don’t hate the first Thor, it’s just… forgettable and feels exceptionally small. For a cosmic film, feeling small was odd. Not every Marvel movie needs enormous stakes, in fact, the more that have smaller stakes the better (action is actually the worst part of most Marvel movies, and having the world saved every quarter grows old, plus it keeps having you wonder why they don’t just get help from their Avengers friends), but something about the film, not the stakes, just felt very small to me.
Plus, Chris Hemsworth’s dyed eyebrows are super distracting, haha.
Like when Thor was Sigurd Jarlson, a mild mannered construction worker who would secretly fight local crime? And the glasses. LOL!
To each their own. While The Dark World was lacking in plot and a memorable villain, I enjoyed the sillier aspects of what amounted to a backdrop for familial character dynamics and the start of Loki’s redemption arc. And yeah, Darcy’s lines were kind of clunky and lacking, but Kat Dennings’ performance was enough to make them mostly work. It’s a filler Marvel film, but still a lot of fun.The worst Marvel film is The Incredible Hulk. It hit many of the exact same beats of the Ang Lee film and stapled it to a random boss fight with a one dimensional villain with the lowest stakes of the entire MCU.
i hope one day everyone will collectively revisit thor 2 and go ‘actually, it was fine’
In a vacuum, it was a perfectly serviceable popcorn flick with some fun action sequences (watching Mjolnir change directions whenever they shifted somewhere is an image burned in my mind, which means SOMEONE on that production did their job well) that was otherwise forgettable.
In context of the MCU, it’s a weak link and appears to have suffered from being a board-setting installment (“we have to put an Infinity Stone in a Thor movie”).I like Kat Dennings, though, and I guess Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist had me primed to like Darcy. I despised what I saw of 2 Broke Girls but it was more the writing than the acting; I was happy she was getting a regular paycheck, at least (now do the same for my girl Natalie Morales!). Her appearance in WandaVision makes me happy.
i also love hiddleston as loki and was happy he was back and prevalent.i think it deserves a place firmly in the middle of the mcu rankings – the sum isn’t anything special but it has some great parts.
Yeah, 2 Broke Girls was bad, but imagine how much worse it would have been without Kat Dennings. On the other hand, don’t: you might as well crawl into a ball in the corner and give up all hope at that point.
I agree on all counts. She was the worst part of the already pretty lame Thor movies, and I don’t really know what other movies people were watching. Sometimes I think that people just go crazy over the return of side characters in the MCU just because they’ve seen them before, and familiarity breeds attraction. I mean, she was REALLY annoying in those initial Thor movies. I found her a little more tolerable in WandaVision, but I definitely wasn’t excited seeing her back, either.
Nonsense. She was a breath of fresh air.
It’s really apparent that the first two Thor movies overloaded their supporting casts. IM and Cap kept it to a manageable number, but Thor basically has two supporting casts (Asgardian, Human), and lots of those characters get lost in the shuffle. It’s why it was really no big deal when the Warriors Three get killed off so perfunctorily in Ragnorak- they were always forgettable in the films.
“Especially the second, where they gave Darcy, who was a sidekick, a sidekick.”That’s the best part of The Dark World!
You shut up, you miserable animal. Kat Dennings is my future wife and clothed romantic cuddling partner and any day now I will be able to verify my long-term theory that she smells like watermelon jolly ranchers and paprika. I will brook no criticism of her beautifully rounded corners.
Wouldn’t call the first one bad, but she sure as Hell was annoying. I was actually bummed when I found out she was in WandaVision, but they reeled in her schtick big time, thankfully.
I like the first Thor quite a bit. When Disney+ launched, I gave dark world another go (cos endgame). Yeah..It was bad.
I liked her in the first movie. Loathed nearly everything in the second. I like her in WandaVision so far. So I’m ok seeing more of her.
Given that it pulled so many similar sweep-everything-we’ve-set-up-off-the-table stunts as The Last Jedi, I always found it interesting that Ragnarok escaped such a fanbase freakout. I suppose most of it was that people just didn’t care that much about Thor stuff built up in the first two movies, but while both movies kinda made up for the table-sweeping by bringing in a fan-favourite character in a major role, Hulk wasn’t exactly a bold take on the character, he was just Hulk doing Hulk things, exactly what we came for.
“Hulk wasn’t exactly a bold take on the character”
Sorry, did you go into a Thor movie looking for a bold take on the Hulk?
Seems like an odd thing to complain about.
Because it was done SO well…
Also helps that Feige smartly understands that slavish attention to continuity and canon might be fine for nerds, but completely wasted on blockbuster audiences.
People gave Ragnarok a pass because it was delightful and fun while The Last Jedi got pilloried because it was an overlong slog.
Hey now, it’s no fun if you just blurt out the truth like that.
But it didn’t, really, upset any pre-existing storylines. Ragnarok was a comics thing that happened just before Avengers Disassembled. The movie also was based off of Planet Hulk. Plus nobody was horribly invested in the Deific portions of Marvel, much less the Thor aspects following 2 mediocre movies.
I guess I would’ve been disappointed if a movie subtitled “Ragnarok” didn’t sweep a lot off the table.
I’m a Last Jedi fan lol but that aside, I think the 2nd Thor movie was such a bummer that it was easy to improve upon that. Besides Loki being popular, the Thor movies were more seen as essential to setting up the larger MCU than anyone’s faves.
It was his first time being vocal, so that was new Hulk stuff.
FYI – Jimmy Woo is an FBI agent. Not an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
I wore a stocking cap yesterday in honor of Darcy’s return to the Marvel Universe & how much I love Kat Dennings. And also because it was cold
Hey, this guy’s making sense over here!
I like her character because the character is a ‘Kat Dennings’ character and I like Kat Dennings. She was delightful (along with the rest of the main characters) in Dollface.
That’s fine. We need her and Randall Park to do an X-Files type series on weird stuff in the MCU.
Thor: Love And Thunder: A Love Story and a Chili Cook-off of Godlike proportions!
“Where’s Darcy?”
“Eh, she’s on the Rag…narok!”
It was.
I don’t.
At this point, who believes any MCU-affiliated actors when they deny that they’re in an upcoming MCU movie? They are not going to admit it, and they are going to actively lie to you. Unless they are Tom Holland or Mark Ruffalo. So I guess just ask those two guys.
They also have a habit of filming scenes while working on other projects and inserting them in other movies. This was why Gwyneth Paltrow “didn’t know” she was in Spider-Man – they filmed her scenes while she was filming something else.
Darcy gets an inordinate amount of hate among the MCU characters and I’m always curious as to why. My first guess is because she’s too jokey, but practically every character in the MCU is a quip machine and no one hates on Happy Hogan or other side characters half as much.
Does she? I know a lot of hardcore comics fans, and everyone likes her.
I know people are just generally against that archetype – the quippy comic relief that comments on the side. I know my fiance went “ugh, one of those” when she was introduced in the show, but has not watched the first two Thor movies.I, meanwhile, had forgotten most of the Thor movies, so I forgot who she was and kinda agreed that I didn’t need that kind of character.
quippy comic relief that comments on the side
I feel attacked.
Then I envy you because every group of fans I talk with (including some people on this very website) has a contingent of people who are *very* vocal about their dislike for her.
Life’s too short to interact with humorless grumps.
Darcy’s reaction to the word “Mjölnir” is the most realistic part of the the MCU.
I never really had much interest in the Thor movies, so she may have been better in those, but I thought her intro in WandaVision had the needlessly unpleasant, tryhard quipster vibes that reminded me of the worst of Whedonspeak. At least the later scenes were more balanced.
I’ll be honest, nothing shuts off my reception to a complaint about a role more than “tryhard.”
Thanks for your honesty!
Part of it is due to her being played by Kat Dennings.
It’s that she’s a blank character to Mary Sue the hell out of (someone once referred to her as “the fandom bicycle”) so she’s in fanfic all over the place and it’s always always always terrible. I have a filter on A03 to make sure fanfic with her doesn’t even show up for me.
So that’s like specifically in fandom though, right? Like I don’t ever watch the movies and think “Man I hate this character because someone is going to use her as their self insert in a story about marrying Loki.”
Yes, it’s specific to fandom. Fandom writers don’t have a lot of female characters to write about anyway. If they find a blank one they just jump on her.
They serioused her up and toned her down quite a bit in WV. She’s wry but not a joke machine, she’s more on the ball than Woo (though he’s a lot less ridiculous, too, doing his orderly FBI thing on the white board), and she knows what she’s talking about.
My theory is that the movies she appeared in aren’t considered the best of the MCEU, people liked Hemsworth and outside of those movies the character’s generally been handled better, so they turn on the supporting cast.Whether they deserve it or not is another discussion. I just realized I’ve seen Thor 2 probably 4 times yet can’t actually recall ANY sort of plot detail or honestly anything. I keep internally getting it confused with Hellboy 2, which is stupid because they really only share “dark elf”. I probably shouldn’t pass judgement on her acting.
Call it what you want, but the 4th Thor movie should be called FTHOUR
Thor 4: More Thor
If she’s lucky she won’t.
I really associate Age of Ultron and Thor 2 as if Marvel was just awful for a few of those years, but the Captain America movies that came out around the same time were fine (the Iron Man ones were bloated and forgettable). A relative was there when I turned on Ultron and asked if it was made in the early 2000s because the CGI was so bad.Kat Dennings is a pro, she Randall Park and Teyonah Parris all fit very well into WandaVision,
I could also see Kat Dennings being more of an asset to a Captain Marvel movie or something else that requires SWORD. As of right now, I don’t think Thor has that need especially if it’s largely set in space.
True, she’s a good fit for WandaVision because it is an event show but she’s sufficiently a star that I can’t see her fitting into an Agents of SWORD on network unless she was one of the lead leads.
I agree to a point, though she was on a network sitcom until recently as a co-lead so I could see her doing an ensemble show on network. Disney+ is harder to say because they definitely are making some big swings. I could see her (and Jimmy Woo) continuing to pop up in movies. We know Monica will be in Captain Marvel 2 which implies SWORD will be. I could see Darcy involved.
Do we know if they are setting Captain Marvel 2 in 2003ish (like with Wonder Woman, not coming right up to the present day)? I feel like they’re going to have Lashana Lynch back even if they’ve killed her off in WV. I think Darcy in this capacity is a big enough part for WV or for a movie but if they have an Agents of Sword the tech sidekick isn’t a big enough part for somebody who is now always leads or co-leads. In the movies they can always use somebody around to “science” the “science.”
Teyonah Parris is confirmed for Captain Marvel 2 as Monica Rambeau which suggests it will be post-Endgame. I suspect we might get some Lashana Lynch flashbacks, but I suspect if it’s pre-Endgame, we’re seeing more of what Carol did away from Earth.Iman Vellani is confirmed as Ms. Marvel (the latter is only relevant because people are speculating about a Young Avengers potentially with Wanda’s kids, Kate Bishop, Florence Pugh’s character from Black Widow and Ms. Marvel). If this speculation is true, it tracks that it’s more contemporary.
Thor 4. Say it out loud a lot. It’s fun.
“I’m goin to the Thor 4 some milk.“ – Mike Tyson
What were you saying?
Dial it back a bit kid
Huh? My mind is elsewhere.
‘released a whole-ass decade ago’To quote Basil Fawlty, everything is bottoms with you Americans isn’t it?
Too bad, she’s been great on WandaVision.
Our collective ears thank whoever made the decision to exclude Dennings.
I was so happy when she showed up!
Hope she pops up somewhere, and more often too. Ditto for Randall Park. I legit like seeing both of them more than about half of the MCU headliners.
I really didn’t like her or Randall Park in the newest episode of Wandavision. Maybe they’re always like that, I dunno, I don’t remember much of Thor or Antman.