Thor: Love & Thunder – 10 Biggest Spoilers

Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder has been surprisingly light on details, but here are the 10 biggest spoilers for anyone who wants to know ahead of time. Director Taika Waititi is back at the helm for another Thor adventure, but this one is surprisingly standalone for a character who was one of the core original Avengers. Even so, Thor: Love and Thunder is packed with Waititi’s trademark humor and more heart than last time.

Love and Thunder is set after Avengers: Endgame and the God of Thunder has been traveling with the Guardians of the Galaxy for some time, trying to heal from his losses. He’s given up the superhero life, and all he wants is peace. However, his journey of self-discovery is interrupted when he learns of a new threat named Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), who has been traveling the universe slaying every god he finds. With New Asgard in his sights next, it’s up to Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Jane Foster/Mighty Thor (Natalie Portman), Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), and Korg (Taika Waititi) to stop him.

Thor’s in uncharted waters, and those waters are full of twists and turns. Along the way, there are plenty of surprises in store, both good and bad. Here are the 10 biggest spoilers for Thor: Love and Thunder.

Thor Leaves The Guardians Of The Galaxy

It’s been known for quite some time that the Guardians of the Galaxy would appear in the movie, and the first trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder confirmed as much. What wasn’t known, however, was how much screen time they’d get and if they’d be an integral part of the movie or more of a cameo. Turns out the answer is closer to cameo, but more substantial than that. Everything with the Guardians from the trailer is taken from the first scene of the movie, which opens with Thor and the Guardians of the Galaxy getting into yet another battle on yet another planet to save its people from hostile invaders. The battle is certainly extended, and Thor spends some downtime with the Guardians after (getting some particularly helpful life advice from Chris Pratt’s Peter Quill). They soon part ways when Thor receives a distress call from Lady Sif (Jaimie Alexander), however, setting out with Korg to track her down while the Guardians depart. So for those wondering if Thor would appear in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, it would appear the answer to that is “not likely.” It’s possible he could appear for a small cameo, but Thor: Love and Thunder appears to have laid the question of him becoming a full-fledged Guardian of the Galaxy to rest.

Lady Sif Loses Her Arm

Thor finds Lady Sif alone, next to the corpse of the mighty Falligar the Behemoth spotted in the trailers, on a planet that Gorr has already visited. Despite being one of Asgard’s fiercest and most skilled warriors, Lady Sif was no match for the God Butcher and the Necrosword. He bested Sif, cutting off her arm and leaving her to die, which she’s in the process of doing until Thor finds her. However, he reminds her that she actually has to die in battle to make it to Valhalla–it doesn’t count if she dies after the fight. Luckily, Thor 4 sees Lady Sif make it back to New Asgard alive, though now missing a limb. It’s likely this is Jaimie Alexander’s last outing in the MCU, but if Sif should return once more, it will be interesting to see how her all-out fighting style has to be adjusted to account for the loss of her arm.

Gorr’s Plan Is More Diabolical Than Anticipated

Those who have read the comics or even seen the Thor: Love and Thunder movie trailers know Gorr the God Butcher is on a mission to kill all the gods. His mission of vengeance is brutal and undoubtedly goes too far, but his tragic backstory makes his white-hot fury at the gods at least understandable. That changes, however, when he turns his sights on Asgard’s children. Knowing he can’t take all of New Asgard alone, he uses the children of Asgard as bait, kidnapping them and bringing them to the Shadow Realm in order to lure out Thor. With his formidable weapon, All-Black the Necrosword, Gorr is at the height of his power in the Shadow Realm and more than a match for Thor, Valkyrie, and Jane Foster. Gorr is terrifying from the start, but the luring away and kidnapping of children turns him into a full-fledged villain.

Heimdall Has A Son Named Axl Who Shares His Powers

After the children are kidnapped, and Thor and his comrades are figuring out what to do, they receive a strange message in the form of a floating head. That floating head belongs to Axl (Kieron L. Dyer), whose glowing eyes make him look an awful lot like another fallen Asgardian. He certainly should–as Thor: Love and Thunder reveals, Axl is Heimdall’s son. More than that, he has inherited his father’s all-seeing powers–even if he hasn’t yet quite perfected how to use them. Axl has a modest but integral role in the movie, vision linking with Thor at various times so Thor can see where they are and how they’re doing. It’s fairly clear that Axl will return at a later date. With Dyer still being in his teens, there’s even a strong possibility that Axl could join the Young Avengers or any other teen superhero group introduced to the MCU.

Korg Is Killed – Mostly (But Later Restored)

Death comes to a number of characters in this movie, but one of those deaths, luckily, is a fakeout. When Thor and his allies reach Omnipotence, the secret realm of the gods, they come to ask Russell Crowe’s Zeus to lend them warriors to stop Gorr. It does not go well. A fight breaks out, and Thor, Valkyrie, Korg, and Mighty Thor lay waste to Zeus’s soldiers, but it comes at a price: Zeus strikes Korg with his lightning bolt and disintegrates him into a pile of rubble. It appears to be the end for the affable Kronan, and it makes sense: pulling double duty with directing and mocapping and voicing Korg has to be taxing on Taika Waititi; killing him off is an elegant, if sad, solution to that problem. However, it’s revealed that one small part of Korg survived, similar to Groot’s twig surviving the crash of Ronan’s spaceship in the first Guardians of the Galaxy. That part is Korg’s face, and the coda to the movie reveals that he later got fully restored with a new rock body.

Jane Foster Has Cancer – And Yes, She Dies

Thor’s entire journey in the MCU has been about losing those he loves and how he deals with it. He has to grapple with death once more, but, unlike his family and colleagues, he at least has some time to prepare to lose Jane. And he’ll have to prepare: Taika Waititi lived up to the promise he was borrowing from Jason Aaron’s Mighty Thor run, where Jane Foster has cancer. Although Thor: Love and Thunder never specifies what kind of cancer it is (it’s breast cancer in the comics), Jane is diagnosed with late Stage IV cancer and the chemo doesn’t seem to be helping much. When she gains Mjölnir and acquires the powers of the Mighty Thor, it seems her problems are magically solved. However, she learns that every time she transforms into Mighty Thor, it uses up all her body’s energy that would otherwise go to fighting the cancer. In other words, being Mighty Thor is killing her. Jane ends up making the ultimate sacrifice, transforming one last time to help Thor in his final battle against Gorr. She dies shortly thereafter in Thor’s arms, telling him not to let his heart be hardened by grief. Jane Foster’s driving goal has always been to help humanity; it’s fitting that Natalie Portman’s version of Mighty Thor chose to put the safety of Asgard’s children before her own.

Jane Goes To Valhalla & Heimdall Is There

After her death, however, Jane finds peace in Valhalla. Though she’d only been Mighty Thor a short time, her wielding the powers of Thor through Mjölnir and sacrificing herself to save New Asgard’s kids granted her entry to Valhalla, the afterlife of Asgardian warriors. None other than Heimdall (Idris Elba) is there to greet her, telling her he’d been expecting her. Apparently, even from the afterlife, Heimdall still keeps his all-seeing eye on things in the realms below and has watched Jane’s actions as Mighty Thor.

The fact that Loki is absent in Thor: Love & Thunder‘s Valhalla scene raises a number of questions, though, such as whether he also went to Valhalla after his Avengers: Infinity War death or if he went to whatever afterlife the Jotun believe in. It also raises the question of whether he went anywhere at all; with his past self from 2012 branching off into a different timeline, is it that version of Loki who will eventually go to an afterlife, or multiple versions? The MCU hasn’t been great about keeping the rules of its various realms and time travel straight so far, so the post-death fate of the original Loki may never be known. However, Thor: Love and Thunder at least left the door open for Mighty Thor to potentially return one day.

Gorr Dies (But Repents By The End)

The villain Gorr’s entire story in Thor: Love and Thunder is driven by vengeance which is driven by grief. His actions throughout the movie are without mercy, ruthless, and utterly unrelenting. Still, his grief over the loss of his daughter (and previously, the rest of his family) is threaded throughout the movie; the pain of his loss has been channeled into fury at the gods he feels have failed him. That unrelenting pain and the corrupting influence of the Necrosword turn Gorr into a monster. Just as he’s about to get what he wants, which is to reach the entity known as Eternity and ask for all gods to be destroyed, he has a change of heart. Thor’s compassion, Jane’s bravery, and their combined pleas convince Gorr to turn from his path of destruction. In the end, Gorr has a change of heart and asks Eternity to take his life in exchange for bringing his daughter back to life, reborn from Eternity. It’s a shame, as Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher is one of the most compelling villains Marvel has ever had, so killing him off after one movie seems a waste of potential. Still, as the MCU has previously shown, anything is possible.

Thor Adopts Gorr’s Little Girl (& Names Her Love)

Before Gorr dies, his greatest fear is that if he gives up his life to restore his daughter, she’ll be left all alone in the world. As the dying Jane gently tells him, “She won’t be alone,” motioning to Thor. Sure enough, Thor adopts Gorr’s little daughter as his own. Being a father brings Thor the sense of closure and peace for which he’s always yearned, even if parenting is hard. Thanks to Jane telling him to keep his heart open, Thor is able to take the child of an enemy and love her as though she were his own–just as his father had done a thousand years ago with Loki. He raises her to be a hero and they travel the universe saving people and defending the helpless. It’s through this that the meaning of the movie’s title finally becomes clear: wherever they go, she is known as Love, and he is known as Thunder.

Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein Is Introduced As Hercules

Audiences usually overwhelmingly name Brett Goldstein’s curmudgeon with a heart of gold, Roy Kent, as their favorite Ted Lasso character. It was certainly his breakout role that put him on the map–and, apparently, on Marvel’s radar. The Thor: Love and Thunder credits scene reveals that Zeus (Russell Crowe) is looking for payback on Thor and summons his mightiest warrior for the task. That warrior is his son, the demigod Hercules, and it’s revealed that Brett Goldstein has been cast in the role. He only has one short line – “Yes, father.” – but the snarl in his delivery coupled with Goldstein’s huge amounts of charisma promise something great once his character is fully introduced. It’s unclear where he’ll show up in the MCU again, but Thor: Love and Thunder set him up as a future adversary for the God of Thunder. In the comics, however, they’re friends and allies, so it could be that the MCU pulls an unexpected twist and Hercules ultimately ends up befriending Thor rather than killing him.

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