It’s been a long time since Marvel’s God of Thunder was unleashed on the big screen, but that’s all about to change very soon thanks to the release of Thor: Ragnarok.
The Taika Waititi-directed threequel is currently the talk of the town ahead of its launch in November, and Collider has today relayed some new intel detailing how Ragnarok dovetails with the overarching Marvel Cinematic Universe. As expected, the cosmic flick takes place two years after Age of Ultron, at a time when Thor’s quest to locate all remaining Infinity Stones continues unabated.
That places Thor: Ragnarok directly beside Spider-Man: Homecoming and Captain America: Civil War on the ever-evolving MCU timeline, and subsequently explains Thor’s absence (and indeed Hulk’s) from the colossal Avengers dust-up of 2016. On the topic of Thor’s intergalactic quest, producer Brad Winderbaum compared the Norse god to a “lone gunslinger,” stating that:
What [Thor] realizes really fast is that this one quest, that universe ending peril that he was trying to figure out, branched off into any number of universe ending perils.
Chris Hemsworth later went on to clarify that Thor: Ragnarok won’t be beholden to the MCU in the sense that all involved “didn’t want to get bogged down in Infinity Stones” and their respective powers. There is, however, some connective tissue that allows Ragnarok to dovetail with the opening of Infinity War, as evidenced by the latter’s leaked teaser trailer.
We didn’t want to get bogged down in Infinity Stones and da-da-da-da because I don’t even understand that stuff a lot of the time…[But] I spoke to The Russos before I even had the script for this and said, ‘How does [Thor: Ragnarok] link into [Avengers: Infinity War]? What can we look out for? How do we continue this time?’… Without giving anything away though, [Thor: Ragnarok] definitely bleeds nicely into those.
And just as Captain America: The Winter Soldier shook the foundations of the MCU, Ragnarok will bring about a big change to Asgard and the remaining Nine Realms.
In Phase One, we established this cosmology that involved Asgard, Odin and certain ideas that you thought were eternal and could never change. [Thor: Ragnarok] breaks them down in a very similar way to how Winter Soldier broke down SHIELD.
Now that it’s been crowned as fall’s most-anticipated movie, Thor: Ragnarok is fast approaching its November 3rd due date. Beyond that, the Marvel Cinematic Universe will soon be bracing for the arrival of Infinity War on May 4th, 2018, before the battle against Thanos reaches its conclusion the following year via Avengers 4.