Love And Thunder brings in Thor‘s biggest opening weekend ever
Taika Waititi's latest godfight is stomping all over the franchise's pre-pandemic entries
Aux News Thor
There are a staggering number of complicated metrics that economists, sociologist, psychologists, and other “How are people doing?”-ologists have used over the years to determine the health of a society: Life expectancy, GDP, how many people get killed in a global pandemic every year, how close the country is to sliding into autocratic fascism, etc. But—if we’re being completely honest—many of these metrics have the major drawback of being total and absolute bummers. Which is why we here at The A.V. Club’s Newswire desk have now invented our own measurement of the health of a functioning democracy: The Mjolnir Index, a.k.a., “How much money has the most recent Thor movie made at the box office in comparison to the other films in the franchise?” And baby, from that point of view, we’re looking at nothing but up, up, up!
Said film is, of course, Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love And Thunder, which, despite receiving a pretty weak critical reception in recent weeks (and despite reports of new COVID variants raging whoops no, that’s the bad metric, just think about the hammers), is set to have the best opening weekend out of any Thor movie ever.
That is, admittedly, grading on a bit of a curve: The first two Thors, directed by Kenneth Branagh, were not exactly barn burners 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 held up as the best of the movies, did quite a bit better in 2017, scoring $122 million in its opening weekend. But Love And Thunder is expected to sail past even that, per THR: Even at Disney’s more conservative estimates, Waititi’s film will likely bring in at least $135 million this weekend, making it the best Thor earner to date, and establishing once and for all that everything is fine, just fine, things can’t be going bad if the hammer man movies are still making this much cash. We repeat this to ourselves. We repeat this to ourselves, until the repetition makes it true.
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Just got home from seeing it. It was… okay. Overall it was fine, but boy oh boy does the tone whiplash back and forth between comedy (which works, hmm, most of the time) and drama. I loved Ragnarok and thought Waititi did a great job on that film (and pretty much everything else I’ve seen him involved with) and love the character of Thor and thought doing the Jane Foster Mighty Thor story was great, but I think maybe Waititi was the wrong director for this movie. It just felt uneven and some of the humor really fell flat for me. I’ll be kind and say it was a B- because I love Thor and thought Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman were really good, but it just squeaks past a C+. Wanted to love it but was a bit disappointed. Oh well. On to She-Hulk (psyched!) and Wakanda Forever (curious how they move forward without Chadwick Boseman and how it fits in with the heretofore nebulous phase 4.)
I’m kinda the same, just saw it tonight. Some of the stuff I loved, particularly the use of B&W, and pretty much everything else about that whole sequence. I like the themes it was going for, and the kids were great. But I feel like Waititi, who I mostly really admire, doesn’t trust sentiment or emotion, or can’t let it pass without sliding in a joke. I don’t think this needed to be No Way Home levels of serious, but the bits with Portman and Bale at the end could’ve landed better. Also Valkyrie’s not very well written (although Thompson’s great), and the Guardians stuff seems pretty unnecessary. But it was fun, I smiled a lot, and the action scenes, as MCU heavy as they are, seem less mish-mashy and easier to follow in terms of geography, space, etc. So there were things I liked a lot. The first movie’s probably better.
Yeah, the Guardians part was very slight, like not much more than was in the previews, and is it me or did Chris Pratt look kind weird? Just… a little off, somehow? And the Gorr intro was not great, it felt very flimsy. It sounds like I hated it, but I actually mostly liked it, it was just not as good as I was hoping it to be.
Possible that Thor spending time with the Guardians was intended to be more substantial when Avengers: Endgame set it up, but became not much more than lip service when it came to making this film.
I noticed Pratt’s a-little-offness, but I think it was his dialogue. It didn’t have the same, I dunno, Guardians rhythm that we’ve come to expect out of Star-Lord’s mouth.
Yea It was a crazy dark theme for a comedy movie. Thor DEEPLY depressed, jane with cancer, Gorrs whole motivation.. and then nonstop jokes. I really enjoyed the movie but yeesh not the best director/storyline mashup.
Taika Waititi’s hardly a stranger to dark themes being treated with a weirdly light touch, this is just his most notable fumbling of the approach.
Edit suggestion:The Dark World was directed by Alan Taylor.
Thor: The Dark World was directed by Alan Taylor, not Branagh.
That’s that patented AVClub lazy writing. An editor may have caught those but sadly there are no editors in California
Who’s got time for editors when there’s all these sweet waves to surf, brah?
This article is seemingly about nothing I just think they had a mandate to pump out Thor articles to provide spaces for commenters to discuss.
I wanted to like it so bad. As a gay man, seeing the same-sex relationships was fun, if crowbarred in, and the music slapped. But I just couldn’t. The movie consisted of all the glaring problems that are a staple of MCU flicks: The plot was the usual get-the-MacGuffin to defeat The Bad Guy of the Movie, the tone jumped back and forth and sacrificed a coherent narrative for forced comedy (Thor and Jane playing the “OMG, working with my ex is so awkward” while for all they know the kidnapped children are being killed), the attempt to tie in real world tragedies with a world of magic and gods (my dad’s currently battling Stage 2 Prostate so maybe it I’m projecting, but them giving Jodie cancer to kill off her character struck me as poor taste), and generally poorly structured story. I think the MCU is hitting what TV Tropes refers to as Original Franchise Sin. The above flaws were always present in the MCU but since the universe was building towards something that was never done before, we had blinders on to an extent. Now that Phase 4 is stumbling (amongst other reasons, Disney is presumably wondering if it would be cheaper just to stick with TV series as movies are unlikely to generate as much revenue in a Post-COVID world), these glitches are much harder to ignore.
I liked Thor: Love & Thunder but unfortunately I didn’t love it. A fun diversion was still had, yet I fell victim to my own great expectations.
https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2022/07/09/will-you-love-thunder-thor-4/
Goddamn you spam your shit here as well? fucking hell
“You’ve been Fostered! But not like that! I mean in a bad way!”
I saw it yesterday and the part when they were introducing Thor and the past were goofy as heck. I was thinking, is this really the movie? The guy next to me, though, loved every moment of it and went nuts after the first after trailer scene. I just thought it was “meh.”
It was so exceedingly forgettable, which is a shame cuz I positively loved Ragnarok. It brought me back to MCU after Iron Man 3 & Age of Ultron thoroughly disappointed me. Guess 1 Taika movie is all I can stand lol
Kenneth Branagh only directed the first Thor movie. Alan Taylor directed The Dark World.
What is this article talking about? You can’t compare the first two Thor films to the two more recent Taika Waititi ones, they’re completely different. You can compare it to Ragnarok. This article doesn’t seem to be saying anything.
Top Gun: Maverick and its opening weekend haul of 160.5 million still wins 2022.