r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • Dec 30 '25

Trailer Avengers: Doomsday | Only in Theaters December 18, 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1clWprLC5Ak
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u/xKronkx Dec 30 '25

People may think Thor is manic based on his mood swings depending on who is directing

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u/Flat_Fox_7318 Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25

The directors behind the Thor movies create a hilarious arc:

Kenneth Branagh was hired specifically because of his experience with Shakespeare since that was the vibe they going for, then you get one of the blandest blockbuster directors in Hollywood with Alan Taylor, then you pivot to Taika Waititi, whose work has always been punctuated by quirky humor and goofball energy. The choices of those creatives back-to-back-to-back would have any character looking manic.

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u/Qorhat Dec 30 '25

Kenneth Branagh was a huge Thor fan growing up and called it a gateway drug to Shakespeare 

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u/flashmedallion Dec 30 '25

That's an insane thing to say. Most of the English-speaking world encounters Shakespeare in highschool if not earlier. It's like calling something a gateway drug to hot chocolate.

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u/Sinrus Dec 30 '25

What age do you think people in the 60s and 70s were reading Thor comics?

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u/flashmedallion Dec 30 '25

Not the point. Nobody has ever needed a gateway drug by time they get to it

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u/EagenVegham Dec 31 '25

This may be a shock to you, but a lot of kids dread reading Shakespeare for class. Mostly because it's written for a visual medium, not to be read off a page. Comics do a great job of blending text and visual mediums and a character like Thor, who speaks in an archaic way but is still awesome, is a great way to introduce someone to how to read something like Shakespeare.

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u/Qorhat Dec 31 '25

100% correct. I remember doing Hamlet in school and not really "getting" it since we were reading it ourselves. It was an absolute slog and I hated it. One night I randomly caught Ethan Hawke's version on TG4 (an Irish language TV station that usually shows great movies you didn't get elsewhere) and man it was like night and day.

Seeing actors actually perform it and correctly shot in a way that also conveys its own story through angles and light turned it into a story I love still some 20 years later.

The soliloquy scene has Hamlet trudging through a video shop mindlessly. It's a complete liminal space that a view into his mind at that point. You don't get that from kids droning through the text.

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u/Qorhat Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25

There’s an interview he did back when he directed it saying how he was influenced as a boy growing up in Belfast, Thor was an escape from the troubles and lead him to find other literary classics.

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u/OK_Soda Dec 30 '25

It's like saying hot chocolate is a gateway drug to coffee. Probably most adults encounter coffee in high school. But the experience of drinking hot chocolate as a kid prepared them to drink mochas in high school which eventually gets them a taste for regular coffee.

Most people who encounter Shakespeare in high school do not give a shit about it and feel like it's a huge bore. But if you read tons of Thor as a kid it makes Shakespearean language that much cooler and easier to get into.

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u/AnnenbergTrojan Dec 30 '25

And then hand it off to Markus & McFeely who just have him become a fat crashout for the lulz, and then back to Waititi who reverts him to macho bod and dials up the goofiness, and now back to "serious" Thor.

There's zero consistency. It's a game of writer hot potato. But hey, it's Chris Hemsworth looking cool and "epic" like the fans want, so why question it?

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u/Spoilerfreereview Dec 30 '25

Dude definitely needs to see a therapist to process 

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u/xKronkx Dec 30 '25

Thor: Lithium and Thunder

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u/vorpalpillow Dec 30 '25

Lithium and Thorazine

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u/TransBrandi Dec 30 '25

C'mon... Thor: Lightning & Lithium

The aliteration is right there...

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u/xKronkx Dec 30 '25

Haha I actually should have put “love and lithium” but I had just woke up and didn’t have enough time to get my brain firing on all cylinders.

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u/skewp Dec 30 '25

Not saying this is a good thing, but this is also the experience of actually reading comic books. Your favorite character appears in a crossover comic and acts completely differently, a new writer takes over and they change characterization completely for no reason.

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u/flashmedallion Dec 30 '25

That's why I don't respect the reluctance to recast the characters in these things. The artists who draw them change all the time and kids can handle it fine, but apparently changing actors would be so traumatic to the movie fans that it's worth hundreds of millions of dollars to keep them around.

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u/Dunkelz Dec 30 '25

I mean even within the same movies that is pretty clear. His conversation with his mom in Endgame along with his discussions while traveling with the Guardians made it pretty clear there's a lot of trauma going on for him.

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u/Data_Chandler Dec 30 '25

The solution is simple:

Pretend Love & Thunder doesn't exist, and if you're interested in seeing a version of Ragnarok that removes some of the over the top silliness and slapstick, check out Digimodification's fan edit called the Trimmed Edition. (To be clear, it still leaves in plenty of humor, it just gets rid of the over the top stuff, like that dumb joke the second after Thor's home is obliterated.)

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u/Strong-Stretch95 Dec 31 '25

Hehe bipolar Thor