Thor: Love and Thunder

About

Thor: Love and Thunder is an MCU movie and the fourth Thor movie starring Chris Hemsworth, making the Thor series the longest-running singular-character-titled movie series from Marvel as of 2022. The film, originally expected to come out in November 2021, received numerous delays and pushbacks before its eventual release nine months later in July of 2022.

History

The film was first announced at San Diego Comic-Con on July 20th, 2019, with the expected release date of November 5th, 2021.^[1] Due to unexpected disruptions brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, the timeframe for its release was shifted multiple times, which increased fan hype for the movie. The film brings back Natalie Portman as Jane Foster and has her play a female Thor-type character or Valkyrie.

Teasers and Trailers

Fans of the MCU noticed that Thor: Love and Thunder was surprisingly still without a trailer as of mid-March 2022 despite the fact that the teasers of most other MCU movies show up less than 180 days before their official movie release date. Some took it as evidence of production issues behind the scenes and further delays.

A trailer (seen below) was eventually released on May 23rd, 2022 to YouTube.^[2]

Reception

Thor: Love and Thunder was released on July 8th, 2022 and after its opening weekend had grossed 144 million in the United States. It received a 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics noting its comedic and romantic tone.^[5]

Related Memes

Tonal Differences

Ahead of and following the movie's release, a number of memes comparing the difference in tone between the earlier, darker installments in the Thor series and the more lighthearted recent films circulated on social media. u/Skavy2507 posted a meme arguing that point (seen below) to Reddit's /r/marvelmemes on May 24th, 2022 which received over 4,000 likes in the course of two months.^[6]

Gorr The God Butcher

Gorr The God Butcher is a supervillain appearing in Marvel Comics, primarily in the Thor: God of Thunder comic book series. A deicidal alien bound on slaying every god he meets for never answering his prayers and letting his family die, Gorr wields "All-Black" the Necrosword with which he kills gods. In May 2022, after actor Christian Bale was revealed as Gorr in the trailer for Marvel's 2022 film Thor: Love and Thunder, the character became a subject of American Psycho and Sigma Male memes due to their association with the actor.

Axl's Apparition

Axl's Apparition refers to a scene in the 2022 Marvel Comics Thor movie Thor: Love and Thunder, wherein, Thor is communicating telepathically with an apparition of Heimdall's son Axl. Screencaps of the scene surfaced on Twitter where meme creators made fun of the VFX and CGI, citing the film's $200 million budget. Axl's face soon became an image macro and exploitable spreading across social media.

Screaming Goats

In Thor: Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi and his CGI team made an artistic choice to give the two goats pulling Thor's chariot make the Screaming Goat Sound which spread as a meme in 2008 and then reached peak popularity with a series of remixes, most notably a 2013 remix of Taylor Swift's hit "I Knew You Were Trouble" (see below) which, in its various versions, received millions of views.^[3]

As Waititi told Insider in a 2022 interview,^[4]

The goats were always going to be in there because they are in the comics, but we didn’t know how they would sound. Then someone in post-production found this meme of a Taylor Swift song that has screaming goats in it. I didn’t even know that existed. So I hear the screaming goats and I just felt it was awesome. A lot of people think it’s me screaming. It’s not.

Search Interest

External References