Now that most of the major players in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are pretty well established, some of the movies are free to distance themselves a little bit from the canon-defining Avengers or Captain America movies. Sometimes this results in a new and unique setting (like in Guardians Of The Galaxy) and sometimes it results in seemingly important plot developments that aren’t nearly as impactful as they probably should be (like Tony Stark blowing up all of his suits at the end of Iron Man 3), but the relative looseness of the MCU is still one of its greatest strengths. Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi seems to understand this, which is why he’s doing what he can to make the movie feel like its own thing—meaning, essentially, that he’s going to ignore as much of the MCU as he can.
Waititi expressed that in a recent Reddit AMA, responding to a question about the previous Thor movies by saying, “I made an effort to ignore the fact that there are other Thor films” and “I’m trying to ignore the rest of the universe and just make my own awesome movie.” Now, based on what we know about Thor: Ragnarok, that actually makes a lot of sense. For one thing, we know Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster is being replaced with a new love interest, and we know Thor was doing his own thing during Civil War, so there’s really no need for it to connect to the other movies. Except, of course, for the twist at the end of Thor: The Dark World where Loki faked his death and secretly took Odin’s place as the ruler of Asgard, which pretty much has to come up at some point.
Elsewhere in the Reddit chat, Waititi said that he hasn’t seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier yet and claimed that his movie will have a “Taika-esque tone” due to Marvel being “very accepting” of his style. He also teased that Bruce Banner will be the breakout character in the film, so maybe Mark Ruffalo will finally get to do something as cool as his “I’m always angry” moment from The Avengers.
Thor: Ragnarok will be in theaters next November.