The latest “Thor: Love and Thunder” trailer is here. And it’s both hilarious and heartwarming. See for yourself here now, above.
According Marvel’s official synopsis, Thor recruits Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) — along with his old friends Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and Korg (Taika Waititi) to help stop Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), who seeks the extinction of the gods.
Together, they embark upon a harrowing cosmic adventure to uncover the mystery of the God Butcher’s vengeance and stop him before it’s too late. And, because this is set to be a very 80s inspired film, the footage is all scored by the Guns N’ Roses’ hit “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”
Of course, along the way it sure looks like Thor and Jane might patch things up. Thor, clearly, has been carrying a torch for Jane. But right now, we’re more invested how he’s also been helpfully crunching numbers to help audiences make sense of the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline after the (honestly not very great) decision to make the “Avengers: Endgame” time skip permanent.
See, Jane asks at one point asks Thor if it’s been “3, 4 years” since last they saw one another. “8 years, 7 months and 6 days, give or take,” Thor says. Obviously we don’t know for sure when “Thor: Love and Thunder” takes place in the new, screwy and confusing MCU. But we do know that’s it’s been 7 years since “Avengers: Age of Ultron” when Thor and Jane were implied to still be together, and 5 years since “Thor: Ragnarok,” when we learned she’d very recently broken up with him, and rather publicly given how Thor’s random fans knew all about it.
If we arbitrarily guess they broke up in 2016, then likely “Thor: Love and Thunder” takes place in 2024, which is where at least two of the other recent Marvel projects ” “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Hawkeye” seem to be taking place.
None of that really matters in terms of assessing this film. We just hate that time skip. Though it is somewhat amusing that Marvel is course-correcting by setting everything that’s come out since “Endgame” at some point between 2023 and 2024, helpfully giving us time to catch up to it.
The trailer is cute, Taika Waititi rules and turned the “Thor” movies into some of Marvel’s most enjoyable stuff, and damned if we can’t get enough of Valkyrie and Jane/Thor bonding while original Thor gets humiliatingly stripped naked.
“Thor: Love and Thunder” is directed by Waititi (“Thor: Ragnarok,” “Jojo Rabbit”) and produced by Kevin Feige and Brad Winderbaum.
“Thor: Love and Thunder” opens in theaters July 8, 2022.
