This story is going to get into spoiler’s for Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, so please stop reading if you have yet to see the Marvel Studios sequel, and still want to be surprised.
The title of the sequel Thor: Love and Thunder made more sense when we reached the finale, because the God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) has “adopted” the resurrected daughter of Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), who goes by the name of Love. The ending sets up more adventures of Thor with a possible new sidekick (who, on screen, is played by Hemsworth’s own daughter, India Rose, which is very sweet). But as we are now learning, the actual steps they took to bring Love to the screen changed over the course of writing, before we got what ended up in the movie.
Thor: Love and Thunder co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson did a post-mortem on the movie with THR, and when they got to the events of the finale, she opened up about some of their conversations, saying:
Gorr was always going to bring his daughter back into existence. There were many different versions of that final scene. There were many different versions of, ‘Does Gorr always make the choice? Does his heart kind of betray him? Does he go to the very last minute, “No I want the gods to die,” but because Eternity grants your deepest desire, it’s his daughter that’s brought back?’ There were a lot of different versions of how she came into being, but her coming into being and that being what is brought forward from Eternity was always the end goal.
It’s fun to learn how Marvel might reverse-engineer its way to an ending, knowing where they want their lead characters to be as they wait for their next appearance, without being 100% sure how to get them there. And speaking of “not being sure,” Jennifer Kaitlyn Robinson also confirmed that she didn’t know Zeus was going to recruit Hercules in the end-credits sequence, or that the god was going to be played by Ted Lasso standout Brett Goldstein!
No, that was a top-secret situation I did not know about, and I was surprised to see at the premiere. It’s fun to come to this movie where I knew all the twists and turns, but could still walk out of it being like, ‘holy shit!’
But what will come of the Hercules reveal? There have been a number of Marvel characters introduced in mid-credits scenes of Phase 4 films, including Eros (Harry Styles), Pip the Troll (Patton Oswalt), Clea (Charlize Theron) and Blade (Mahershala Ali). They will have to show up in future MCU movies, and some of them – like Clea and Hercules – seem destined to show up in Doctor Strange and Thor movies… but how long until those sequels actually happen? We could be talking years.
Marvel recently unveiled its Phase 5 slate, and started to tease Phase 6. Keep checking our Upcoming Marvel Movies slate to see when changes are made.
