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Teaser Trailer up. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgB1wUcmbbw)

Edit by Trippy: Theaters, July 8

Looks amazing, can't wait. I love how they keep finding ways to fit in goofy comic book outfits.

Trailer (lots of possible spoilers):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go8nTmfrQd8

This and Guardians 3 (when it's eventually made), this is all I'm holding out for.

I really have to hand it to Gunn and Waitiki - they made the Marvel (movie) universe fun.

Ragnarok is my favorite Marvel movie by a pretty big margin, so I'm looking forward to this one. I'd also put Ant-Mans on the list of fun movies.

Not as good as Ragnarok, but I enjoyed this well enough. Probably just above Homecoming on the top of my mid-tier. It helps that I love goats.

That said, I'm not sure what Feige was talking about when he said the direction of Phase 4 would be clearer after this movie, aside from a couple things:

I really hated this. My family liked it, so I'm just being a sourpuss, I guess. But it's the first Marvel movie that I'd say I actively disliked rather than shrugged at or was merely bored by.

And I love Ragnarok and almost everything Waititi does.

The critics have not been kind so you aren't alone in that regard. Audiences, so far, have liked it a lot better than the critics.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/thor_love_and_thunder

Latest MCU rankings by RT critic scores:

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/all-marvel-cinematic-universe-movies-ranked/

I liked it well enough, nowhere near as much as Ragnarok but still highly entertaining. Basically about the same as Guardians 2 compared to Guardians 1. Why the hell was Zeus speaking in a Russian accent anyways?

I didn't think that was Russian, it was like some weird bad Australian version of an Italian accent, like a pizza parlor guy or something. Whatever it was, it was stupid.

I can see people not liking it because Thor really gets played as too much of a joke for any sort of character arc for him to really land (saw one person point out that when Thor has to look to Star Lord of all people for wisdom, things have gone awry) . Also I personally would have liked to see Jane's arc play out over multiple movies. Overall though I had fun with it.

I'm also curious how much Guns N' Roses got paid for this movie.

I think that's a big part of it for me--it felt like a tonal dart board, where any random ten-minute sequence would try to at once say "oh the feelings, this is genuinely sad" and "Thor is really trying to be a better person guys" and "Thor is a fucking asshole and everybody hates him and he doesn't know it" and "oh for fuck's sake are any of you stupid enough to be invested in any of this? it's just silly fun you silly heads, it's a comic book" and "look at my clever cleverness, the rock god is sitting on a throne of scissors, I crack myself up". You certainly couldn't take the idea that Thor has an arc even remotely seriously, except that his arc is maybe trending towards 'he is a really dumb fucking bro asshole'. If Loki had been in this movie, I'd have been rooting for him to stab Thor. If they'd played Gorr with even a slight bit more investment, I would have been on Team Gorr.

Didn't even fucking notice that, that's hilarious.

I mean, it is! but the thing goes from one-off Airplane! level jokes like that to wanting us to be invested in Thor's character development to wanting us to care about Gorr's emotions to wanting us to think that "love" really is the thing that makes the universe go round only even at the end I'm not at all convinced that Thor isn't just going to wander off and be a deadbeat again.

I think part of the problem, and maybe why Iron Man, Strange, and Thor have struggled a bit with their sequels is because they've all completed their main arcs in their first movies. You've got these arrogant, privileged guys who are suddenly put in a position where they're vulnerable and they learn how to become heroes. After that, what do you really do to continue to develop them? Generally the answer seems to been to have them backslide a bit or spin their wheels. Thor has spent his 3 sequels so far realizing that he doesn't want to be king, but also still being wishy-washy about what he actually wants to be.

GotG2's least successful character arc I think was Rocket's whole "I act like an asshole to push people the people I care about away" thing. Further defining the familial relationships between Star Lord and Yondu, and Gamora and Nebula, were the more successful arcs.

I loved No Way Home, but it could also be noted that Spider-man's solo outings have largely been about dealing with the ramifications of his horrific decision making. Tom Holland's Spidey arc here is once again learning that with great power, comes great responsibility.

Ragnarok is maybe more notable for continuing to develop Loki's character rather than Thor's (about the only thing Dark World was successful at as well).

Cap on the other hand started out heroic, and has arc across his movies was largely about his increasing distrust and disillusionment with those in charge (after having started off his career as a soldier). As such I think he has the most successful solo franchise in the MCU.

Wish there was more Gorr in this.   Christian Bale killed the role.

It would have been nice to see one action scene of Gorr killing some big scary god, for sure, as opposed to a quick montage of "gods Gorr has killed" followed by "oh my look Sif is there, her arm is missing, which is evidence that Gorr is a badass but somehow is also funny for some reason."

I enjoyed this but tonal dart board is a pretty bang on criticism. I enjoyed most of the bits in this, the comedy landed well where it happened, the actions scenes were fun and most of the emotional scenes were well done but they were all hugely undercut by being all mashed together. They really needed to try and pull back on the humour a bit for the third act at least. As much as I really did enjoy it, ultimately having jokes popping in meant that there never really felt like there were proper stakes in the actions and the comedy sometimes didn't flow properly.

I will say the whole major plot that someone was trying to kill the gods never felt particularly serious. Thor is pretty much the only god we saw who was in any way sympathetic and as a consequence it just felt like Gorr's whole thing needed to be stopped to save Thor. They could really have done with doing at least a little bit of set up for why the audience should give a shit about stopping Gorr from killing all the gods. That said all the jealous weapon bits were fantastic.

It just also feels like they suddenly peopled the MCU with an absolute asston of very super-powered beings who have no explanations or backstories.

Which, to be honest, is pretty faithful to the Marvel comics, too, where it's really hard to figure out what the fuck "gods" actually are. But the MCU bent over backwards to make it clear that the Asgardians weren't gods in the sense of supernatural beings who arose out of or on Earth, they were aliens with tech-so-advanced-it-was-magic and they sometimes came to Earth to fight Ice Giants and shit. (After Ragnarok, that got more complicated; if you buy Hela's story, they also conquered a lot of places.)

How you fit all the pantheons (human-connected and otherwise) into that is more complicated. I guess there's a lot of super-advanced aliens in the galaxy who sometimes visit or get really attached to a single planet or society. Which really could have made Gorr even more sympathetic if they wanted to play it that way--basically these are very very powerful cultures that take advantage of less powerful ones without much fear for the consequences. But that would have taken enough tonal focus to tell that story a bit more clearly. Waititi managed it in Ragnarok with Hela, though.

A god is someone who was powerful enough to have worshippers and egotistical enough to roll with it. That's why they are all assholes.

Yeah, it's just that if there's LOTS of them in the universe, it starts to have the same problem as a single planet over-choked with superheroes. There stops being anything special about them at all.

That is the point. Just dumb people that see someone call down lightning and decide he is the god of thunder. If the Avengers had shown up a thousand years earlier they'd be gods too like the Eternals. They are not supposed to be special.

Man, you guys hate fun.  :why_so_serious:

This movie was fucking fun. It was hilarious, had some good gags, was visually stunning with a kickass soundtrack, and in the end, it had stakes that mattered to the characters involved. The God killing thing was a plot device - it wasn't the real stake. It's the necessary set piece superhero conflict in a movie that was a lot more about Thor learning he needs connection to be whole. The gods were as much a metaphor for his entire schtick - he gets to show up for 2 seconds, be a badass that also destroys all sorts of shit around him (including relationships), expects to be praised but then fucks off when things get complicated. I've just watched it, so it may fade with time, but I really dug this one.

I'm starting to just not worry about "Phase 4" or whatever building to some big end game story. It's nice to have things like She-Hulk and Ms. Marvel and this where even if the stakes are sort of dire, they really aren't giant, world/universe-shattering conflicts.

On longer reflection, I still fucking hate it. The idea that Thor learns anything about himself in any sort of genuine way is just all sorts of nope. I have never felt less connected to the alleged emotional or dramatic arc of a superhero film than this one. It's just a bunch of gags, many of which are funny by themselves, a few of which are just dumb either by themselves or in combination with anything else (Crowe's Zeus), with no real story to back them up.

This movie ripped, killjoy.

We thought it was a lot of fun, easily as good as Ragnarok.

Thor 4 was great fun and made me like Natalie Portman... which I thought was impossible. Now my good, bad and meh mcu is at

Good
Spiderman
Loki
Black Widow
Falcon Winter Soldier
Thor 4

Meh
Wanda
Hawkeye (didn'tc watch the entire thing to judge)
Moonknight (didn't watch the entire thing to judge)
She Hulk (giving this a chance after megan but ep 4 feels like a kid show...)

Bad
Doctor Strange (I should consider this a meh but i strongly dislike more choices than occasional funny)
Eternals
Shang Chi
Ms Marvel


To be fair I think phase 4 is more a return to what Disney brand really is which is mostly a family friendly thing for family and small children than any intentional sabotage. Like she hulk should be raunchier and little more dead pool (seeing how she was deadpool before deadpool) but that's not a Disney brand. This is a weird fact that is marvel fans of characters liken thor and the hulk are more sources comedy than the super serious characters. Which is funny because giving Thor and Hulk the funny treatment works waaay better than giving every character in my bad the same energy. Save for Ms Marvel... thats just a kid show and I didn't grow up watching disney channel originals.

The formula is set enough at this point that they really can't do anything TOO relentlessly serious (which is why I'd expect a soft reboot for Daredevil that takes out a bit of the grimness) even though the entire universe has been shaped by an event where half of everything alive disappeared and enough of the implications of that have been explored to make it clear that it was a horrifying and grim experience in all the ways that you'd think.

(I keep thinking about all the almost amusing other consequences, though...like, did everyone who survived the Snap suddenly have half their gut biota reappear after five years of readjustment? there would have been a lot of really bad diarrhea for a few weeks...)

I don't think that puts anything especially off-limits in terms of Marvel's overall IP, though. There's no character who has to be done in a truly dark way in order to work at all; nothing even as dark-adjacent as Batman, really. (Who has had plenty of fun/silly versions and adaptations.) Maybe the X-Men invite it a bit because of the way that they've become attached to the racism/Holocaust comparisons. You can even have a relatively light version of Ghost Rider or Son of Satan if you want.

Was fun. If not as good as the last Thor.

But I'm not sure it should be two hours long if they can't vary the pace a little.

If anything I think most of the latest MCU movies needed more time. This needed more god slaying, Dr Strange needed more multiverse traveling, Eternals needed significantly more time to introduce all those characters and make you give a shit about them.

They need to get the balance right of what we should see and what we don't need to see. Scarlet Witch ate up a lot of the time that should have been spent on Strange's own multiversal lives, for example.

It's hard not to think that some of this is cheaping out--Gorr fighting gods could have been an amazing scene but it would have been expensive. It's been a while since the MCU served up a really fucking awesome action sequence, I think?

Shang-Chi and Strange both had fucking awesome action sequences.

Shang-Chi had some really good but not quite great ones that I don't think stand up to the standard of the absolutely most memorable action in the sub-genre that Shang Chi is connected to.

I liked Strange 2 better than a lot of people and there were some memorable action stagings (Wanda's attack on the temple, Strange's possession of the dead body) but I'm not sure any of them crossed into awesome.

I finally got to see this. I liked it quite a bit. Hope we see Jane again somewhere.

if strange had any awesome action sequences, they were flushed down the toilet by the music one

Then you'll be happy to know that Wakanda Forever reportedly will have a runtime of 2 hours 41 mins.

They are too short if you want to keep every interaction they put in the versions that got released. But too long if you just want a fun MCU movie.

Most of the post end game MCU should have had the script editted way down, or should have been made into a TV show.


Shang Chi : Cut the entire shit village thing and do the finale at the ten rings hideout. Story is about main character and his dad, not Michelle Yeoh.
Morbius : nobody cares
Eternals : TV show, obviously.
Spiderman : Fine.
Strange : TV show. Named for Wanda. strange 2 should have been an entirely different story.

Hur hur strange worlds

Phase 4 was a mess

Eternals should just not have happened at all. Agree with Strange 2, that was a hot mess and I have a Cumberbitch at home. She'll likely never watch another MCU movie other than Strange 1, which she will watch any time it's on tv. Besides being a Wanda movie, the whole star portal girl thing was awful.

They just announced Armor Wars will now be a movie instead of a 6-episode series, so I expect that to be way too much for a movie (same writer).

Shang-Bro needed to start with better casting for the lead. Great supporting cast, but ugh. Why not just pair him with Danny Rand for a series of garbage acting and action?

Idk man shang chi was great.

WandaVision, Loki, and No Way Home (and She-Hulk so far) were top tier MCU. Shang Chi, Love and Thunder, Hawkeye, and Ms Marvel were fun. I also found Strange 2 fun but know some folks here dislike it. Black Widow was watchable. There were some duds in the mix, but overall I think Phase 4 has had a lot to like and we still have Werewolf by Night and Wakanda Forever coming.

I liked a lot of phase 4 individually.

Phase 4 was still a mess. Even Feige agrees.

It doesn't cohere very well. Maybe it will in hindsight when we see what's trying to point to (if anything). It just may be that we are thinking of it as one cohesive story like Phase 3 but it's more like a phase 1.5 - origin stories of new characters/threats that don't have a lot to do with each other until they do.

My headcanon for both Waititi Thor outings is that they are drunken retellings. The first by Thor himself, the latter by Korg. Okay I don't know if Korg was drunk (or can even get drunk), but he was apparently narrating to children. Plus he can get Jodie Foster confused with Jane Foster, which tells you how reliable the rest of his storytelling is.

That said, I enjoyed Love and Thunder while agreeing with a lot of the criticisms. It was a fun romp, but even less "canon" than the rest of the multiverse.

But then, I loved Strange 2. Sam Raimi forever, and evil Wanda is the best Wanda.

Before avengers 2, MCU coherence was just referencing macguffins in post credit scenes.

I'm really not bothered that phase 4 was disconnected, but the films needed longer in the writer's room, and a someone with a freer hand on the scissors in the editing suite.