Thor: Love and ThunderSave

The film opens with a backstory sequence on a desolate alien wasteland. A man named Gorr is dying alongside his small daughter, who succumbs to dehydration in his arms. Gorr drags himself across the dunes praying to the god he had served his entire life — Rapu, a callous deity who appears casually in a hidden oasis surrounded by feasting servants. Rapu mocks Gorr's grief and dismisses prayers as worthless. Gorr stumbles upon the cursed weapon called the Necrosword — a sentient blade that slowly corrupts its wielder while granting them godlike powers. Gorr kills Rapu with it and swears to murder every god in the universe. He becomes Gorr the God Butcher. Cut to Thor, having spent the years since Endgame traveling with the Guardians of the Galaxy across countless cosmic conflicts.

The Asgardian refugees — having lost their homeworld in Ragnarok — have settled into a small Norwegian fishing village called New Asgard, ruled by Valkyrie. The village has become a tourist destination, with Asgardian battle cries reenacted for visiting cruise ship passengers. New Asgard receives a distress signal: Gorr's invasion has reached their world. Thor returns urgently. Meanwhile, on Earth, Jane Foster has been diagnosed with stage IV cancer. She has refused treatment that involves toxic chemicals, despite her doctor's urging, and has been pursuing a desperate experimental therapy: locating Mjolnir, Thor's shattered hammer (broken by Hela in Ragnarok), which has been stored in pieces at New Asgard.

Jane visits New Asgard's hammer memorial, where she has discovered through her research that Thor enchanted Mjolnir long ago to protect the woman he loved. Standing before the broken pieces, she feels the hammer's call. The fragments reassemble themselves and fly into her hand. Jane is transformed by the hammer's enchantment into the Mighty Thor — restored to full physical health, equipped with combat powers, wielding Mjolnir as she had once dreamed. The transformation, however, is killing her. Each use of the hammer's enchantment further depletes her cancer-weakened body's ability to recover, and the hammer is consuming her faster than the chemotherapy ever would have.

Thor and the new Mighty Thor reunite at New Asgard during Gorr's attack. The reunion is awkward — they had broken up years before Endgame after a relationship struggle. Together with Valkyrie and Korg, they fail to capture Gorr but learn his ultimate plan: he intends to travel to Eternity, a cosmic entity at the center of the universe that grants any wish to those who reach it. Gorr's wish will be the simultaneous destruction of every god in existence. To reach Eternity, he needs the location, which only the Asgardian gods know via their pantheon archives. Thor, Mighty Thor, Valkyrie, and Korg travel to Omnipotence City — a vast assembly of cosmic gods presided over by Zeus. Thor expects help. Zeus refuses to engage with the threat, viewing Gorr's slaughter as a problem confined to lesser deities.

The Omnipotence City sequence is one of the film's primary set-pieces. Thor's confrontation with Russell Crowe's broadly comic Greek-tinged Zeus ends in a fight where Thor uses Zeus's own thunderbolt — the Stormbreaker analogue — against him. Thor is left with the bolt as a trophy. Korg is killed but his rocky body's eyes survive (he is later revived). Thor, Mighty Thor, and Valkyrie travel to a ghostly shadow realm where Eternity's location is encoded. Gorr beats them there. He has kidnapped New Asgard's children — including Heimdall's son Astrid (now using the warrior name Axl) — and is using them as cosmic bait to lure Thor to a final confrontation.

The final battle takes place at the boundary of Eternity itself, in a black-and-white realm where color drains away from the camera. Thor and Mighty Thor fight Gorr together. Mighty Thor's body is failing rapidly; she has used Mjolnir's power one too many times. The two heroes corner Gorr at the gateway to Eternity. Gorr, granted his wish, can have any reality he wants. Thor, dying, suggests another path: Gorr can use his wish to save his own daughter — to bring her back from death. Gorr, the Necrosword's corruption finally lifting in the face of Thor's mercy, agrees. He uses his wish to revive his daughter. The Necrosword crumbles. Gorr dies in his daughter's arms. Mighty Thor dies in Thor's arms moments later, telling him to keep believing in himself before her body fades away.

The film's epilogue shows Gorr's revived daughter being raised by Thor in New Asgard. Together they fight side by side as a father-daughter duo, with Thor leading her into combat and her using granted godlike powers. The film closes on this image. The mid-credits scene shows Zeus, recovering from his injuries, dispatching his son Hercules (played by Brett Goldstein in a brief cameo) to hunt Thor for revenge — setting up a potential future Thor entry. The post-credits scene shows the deceased Mighty Thor arriving in Valhalla, where she is welcomed by Heimdall — the original Asgardian gatekeeper killed in Infinity War.

Thor: Love and Thunder grossed $760 million globally on a $250 million budget. Critical reception was significantly more divided than for Ragnarok. The film's heavy reliance on tonal whiplash — leaping between Christian Bale's genuinely terrifying Gorr performance and Taika Waititi's broad comedy beats (including screaming sentient goats) — divided fans of the previous Thor film. Bale's understated, makeup-stripped performance as Gorr was widely praised; many critics called it one of the stronger MCU villain performances. Natalie Portman's return as Jane Foster, twenty-five years after her last Marvel appearance, was warmly received but the character's death in the climax left audiences emotionally polarized. The film's box office performance — strong but not Ragnarok-level — combined with its mixed reception led Marvel Studios to put the Thor franchise on indefinite hiatus, with no fifth solo Thor entry currently in development.

Several creative decisions in the film became flashpoints in fan discussions. The screaming sentient goats Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder, granted to Thor by a herd of grateful villagers in the second act, became running comic relief that some critics called the film's most charming element and others called its most distracting. Russell Crowe's broadly comic Greek-tinged Zeus performance — full of camp, costume changes, and exaggerated mannerisms — divided audiences. Korg's resurrection from a single eye, made into a Christmas-tree-style decoration after he is destroyed early in the climax, was treated as comic relief rather than the genuine death it was promoted as in trailers. Natalie Portman's physical transformation for the Mighty Thor role — significant gym time, weight gain — was widely admired, and her chemistry with Hemsworth had improved since their first collaboration in Branagh's 2011 Thor.

The Jane Foster cancer storyline drew from Jason Aaron's 2014 comic-book run, which had also given Jane the hammer at the cost of her life. Bringing this storyline to the screen required Marvel Studios to commit to killing a major returning character — a choice that fit the broader emotional arc of Thor's own grief but felt thinly developed by the film's runtime. The post-credits Hercules tease has yet to be developed in subsequent films as of 2025; Brett Goldstein's appearance was a one-scene cameo with no announced return. The film's enormous opening weekend ($143 million domestic) suggested franchise health was strong, but the steep drop-off in the second weekend (a 67 percent decline) signaled that audiences had not connected with the picture in the way they had with Ragnarok five years earlier.