Thor: Love and Thunder will be the next big screen outing for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and with the addition of Jane Foster as The Mighty Thor, the film promises to be a fun and exciting new chapter in the MCU. However, it is looking like Love and Thunder may tell its story much faster than many recent entries, as it’s being reported that the new Thor movie is actually quite short, at least by Marvel standards, at one minute less than two hours.
Tickets went on sale for the first showings of Thor: Love and Thunder today, and while some tickets sites, like Cinemark and Fandango, are not currently listing a runtime. Regal’s pre-sale page is listing the film’s length as 120 minutes, while the page from AMC is calling it one hour and 59 minutes.
At this point the runtime should be treated as rumor. The fact that some ticket sites don’t even have a runtime listed implies Marvel hasn’t given them anything official. Still, movie showtimes have been set, most are running about 3 hours between screenings, which is about normal for a two hour film. The runtime can’t be a great deal longer than that without the theaters having to make serious changes. Initial reports of the runtime for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness were much higher than what we ended up getting.
While a two hour movie isn’t exactly a short film, it’s at the long end of what we used to call standard, with most features running between an hour and a half and two hours, big tentpole films, and Marvel movies specifically, have been consistently running 15 to 20 minutes beyond two hours, and sometimes longer. The recent Jurassic World: Dominion was just short of two and a half hours long, the longest movie in the franchise.
Having said that, Thor as a franchise has consistently run shorter than the rest of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Thor: Ragnarok ran two hours and 10 minutes, and is the longest Thor movie to date, with the original film and The Dark World both running less than two hours. Thor: The Dark World is actually tied with The Incredible Hulk as the shortest MCU movie to date, at one hour and 52 minutes.Of course, since Dark World isn’t exactly the most popular MCU film, that’s not a bad thing.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was two hours and six minutes long, making it a bit on the shorter side as well. One wonders if we’re starting to see a trend of shorter Marvel films, or if this is just an odd coincidence. Marvel has been more than willing to let movies exceed three hours, so it seems this is just a case where a couple of recent directors didn’t need two and half hours to tell their story. The length isn’t as important as long as everything inside that two hours is great.
