Thor: Love and Thunder TRIVIA!!!!!

The latest from Marvel Studios, Thor: Love and Thunder, is now showing in town!!! And here are some interesting little tidbits about the latest adventure of the God of Thunder!!!

• Christian Bale had initially turned down the possibility of appearing in any more comic book or superhero films after The Dark Knight Rises (2012), seeing the genre as uninteresting from an acting perspective, and especially finding the experience of donning the Batman costume to be a miserable one. He agreed to take part in this film however, after his kids begged him to take the role.

• Gorr's daughter is Chris Hemsworth's daughter in real life, India Rose Hemsworth.

• Thor's vest has the image of a tree-like structure formed from nine orbs. This is a stylish rendering of the World Tree Yggdrasil, in Norse mythology the depiction of the cosmos and its nine realms.

• Christian Bale almost dropped out of the film due to scheduling conflicts. Bale usually prefers to have wider gaps between projects but this time he had only three days after finishing shooting a film in Los Angeles and starting the mandatory Covid-19 quarantine in Australia. It was his children who eventually convinced him to make the scheduling work.

• Thor's goats Toothgrinder and Toothgnasher appear in the film. These goats had appeared in both the Marvel comics and Norse myth of Thor.

• As of the movie premiere (July 8, 2022), Thor is the only MCU character to have four stand-alone films.

• In the comics, Gorr the God Butcher's powers are shared with the symbiote beings (Venom, Carnage, etc) due to Gorr's weapon the Necrosword being created by Knull, the dark god of the symbiotes. The film makes no mention of the symbiotes, as they are currently having films produced by Columbia Pictures (though one made it to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), a Columbia-Marvel co-production). Thus, the previous wielder of the Necrosword, implied to be Knull, is made an unknown and unnamed figure.

• The title design was inspired by the "sword and sorcery" subgenre, which was especially popular in the 1980s.

• Thor: Love and Thunder marks Natalie Portman's official return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Jane Foster. After her experiences working on Thor: The Dark World (2013), Portman had decided to retire from doing any more MCU films. But when it was revealed she had a voice cameo in Avengers: Endgame (2019), this suggested Portman was game for another Thor movie. This was officially confirmed at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con when Portman walked on stage and director Taika Waititi handed her a Mjølnir prop, also confirming that Jane would become The Mighty Thor in this film. She then made her official return in the animated series What If...? (2021).

• Due to its trailer being released much later on, Thor: Love and Thunder has broken the record for the shortest gap between an MCU movie's first trailer debut and its theatrical release with less than a two month gap between both.

• This is based on Jason Aaron's Thor comics, where Thor encounters Gorr the God Butcher and suffers a crisis of faith, and where Jane Foster claims the Mjolnir hammer and takes the title of Thor. Both plotlines are separate in the comics, but are combined/linked in this film.