Thor: Love and Thunder, the long awaited fourth movie in Marvel’s Thor series, is reportedly undergoing reshoots just a few months before its currently scheduled July 8 premiere. What exactly might Marvel Studios be reshooting? What does this mean for the movie’s release date? Here’s everything we know!
Thor: Love and Thunder will pick up where Avengers: Endgame left off, when Thor took off with the Guardians of the Galaxy and named Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) King of New Asgard. In the new installment, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) will face Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale) as Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) proves herself worthy of wielding Mjolnir, taking up the mantel of the Mighty Thor. Russell Crowe will also star as Zeus, and Taika Waititi will reprise his role as Korg. The Guardians crew is also along for the ride, and we’ll see Matt Damon likely reprise his cameo role as “actor Loki.”
Like Thor: Ragnarok, Love and Thunder is directed by Waititi, who has hinted that it’s going to be even more ridiculously fantastic. In a 2021 interview with Empire (via The Hollywood Reporter), Waititi said that “If you wrote down all the elements of this film, it shouldn’t make sense…It’s almost like it shouldn’t be made.” He also said, though, that “there’ll be far more emotion in this film. And a lot more love. And a lot more thunder.”
Unfortunately, the movie has already seen more than its fair share of delays. The film was first delayed, along with the rest of the MCU’s slate of new releases, in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the film industry for several months. The new release date was pushed back to February 2022, but then the movie was delayed again to May, and finally to its current release date of July 8. Now, according to The Wrap, the movie is “going back for additional photography in the next few weeks,” and those of us who have been waiting for years to get some more Thor in our lives are biting our nails. Is the movie going to be delayed again?
Don’t Panic Yet! Reshoots are Normal
The first thing to remember is that reshoots are pretty commonplace in film production, especially with Marvel movies. Both Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness have undergone reshoots. Sometimes scenes are improved, or additional characters or plot details are added after principle photography has concluded. Sometimes reshoots are held in order to accommodate actors who weren’t available earlier in the production schedule. While reshoots used to be seen as a sign that something was going significantly wrong with a movie, nowadays they’re seen as a normal part of the process.
Of course, fans are understandably jittery about Love and Thunder‘s release date. The movie is supposedly premiering in less than four months, and although action figures and LEGO sets have started to trickle out, there’s no trailer yet. Waititi joked in a red carpet interview with Variety that the movie would be finished in the nick of time, saying, “comes out in July, so probably like end of June? Probably like a day before the premiere, that’s how we do it.”
Significantly, though, Marvel itself hasn’t mentioned the reshoots, which may indicate that they’re relatively minor. That would make it possible to keep the July 8 premiere date even while using the reshoots to take care of whatever needs to be changed or fixed in the movie.
That won’t stop us from indulging in wild speculation, of course. What additional photography might Waititi and the rest of the production team be going back to get? Maybe they’re adding a cameo (has anyone seen Tom Hiddleston sporting a black wig lately? No? Drat). Maybe they’re tweaking the story to make it fit with changes in the larger MCU story arc. After all, the theme of Phase 4 is the multiverse, so fans are itching to see how all the new films will build up to an epic battle against Kang the Conquerer. Or maybe they’ve decided to turn the entire movie into two hours of Melissa McCarthy running around in a Hela costume!
Or, you know, maybe there are just a couple of scenes they didn’t get quite right.
In any case, for now, we’ll just have to keep counting down the days until July 8. What’s your wildly implausible theory for what new stuff they might be adding to the movie? Let us know in the comments!
(image: Marvel)
