Thor 4 Theory: Love & Thunder Is Secretly A Time Travel Movie

There are clues that indicate Thor: Love and Thunder may secretly be another Marvel time-travel movie. If that’s true, it wouldn’t be the first MCU project that fits into the genre, nor would it be the last. The MCU took its characters on an adventure through time for the first time in Avengers: Endgame when it sent Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to earlier points in the MCU’s history to retrieve the Infinity Stones.

What transpired in Endgame set the MCU’s time travel rules, which are sure to be adhered to going forward by other Marvel movies and shows. Marvel is now embracing these ideas more deeply than before by making branching timelines and the multiverse the core of its third Disney+ show, Loki, with the introduction of the Time Variance Authority. Apparently, the TVA are the ones responsible for policing the timestream and protecting it from threats.

Time travel will be back at the forefront in 2023 when Marvel Studios releases Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which will see the two heroes going head-to-head with Kang the Conqueror, an evil time traveler and one of the Avengers’ greatest adversaries in Marvel Comics. Both the title and the villain erase any lingering doubts about Ant-Man 3, revisiting what Endgame revealed about the Quantum Realm and its time travel connections. But apart from the TVA and Kang the Conqueror, the MCU may actually have other stories related to these concepts in the pipeline for Phase 4. One could be coming between Loki and Ant-Man 3. Here’s why Thor: Love and Thunder could be about time travel too.

Gorr’s Time Travel Connections In Marvel Comics Explained

Time travel played an important role in the original story of Gorr the God Butcher, who will be brought to life by Christian Bale in Love and Thunder. In the comics, Gorr the God Butcher has a reputation as an all-powerful alien who journeys across the universe on a killing spree against the gods of countless pantheons. At one point in his crusade, he battled a group called the Time Gods. After killing them, he discovered that he could use their blood to enter the timestream. This proved beneficial to his cause because it enabled him to eliminate gods that he normally wouldn’t have had the power to kill. By going back far enough, he found that he could kill off the strongest of the gods before they could become powerful.

Gorr eventually made a base of operations for himself in the distant future, where he enslaved the gods who had fallen to him. Gorr’s ambitions grew, with the character deciding to build a Godbomb, which would obliterate all gods throughout the timestream. To defeat him, it took a team-up between a time-traveling group of Avengers and three different iterations of Thor (all from different phases in his life). Thanks to their combined efforts, Gorr’s plans were thwarted.

Time Travel In Thor 4 Would Explain Mjolnir's Return

Love and Thunder doing something along those lines with Bale’s take on Gorr would make sense of one of the movie’s biggest mysteries. Set photos and other details have confirmed that somehow, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) will become “Mighty Thor” by proving to be worthy of Mjolnir. What’s confusing about that is the fact that Mjolnir was destroyed by Hela (Cate Blanchett) in Thor: Ragnarok. If there was a way for it to be fixed, it’s likely that Thor (Chris Hemsworth) would have found it by now. Since that hasn’t happened, there must be another explanation for how it returns.

One possibility that might work for the story is time travel. If they go back in time, the heroes could get their hands on Mjolnir before the events of Ragnarok. Having taken it from the past himself when he visited 2013 Asgard in Endgame, Thor already knows this would work and could suggest it again if circumstances allowed for it. So if Thor were to travel back to a previous era in the MCU’s history to stop Gorr, he could obtain his hammer from his younger self. After that, it could wind up in Jane Foster’s possession, thus making her Mighty Thor transformation possible.

What Gorr's Real Plan In Thor 4 Could Be

All along, it’s been assumed that the first time-traveling villain to attack the heroes of the MCU will be Kang the Conqueror, but if the MCU’s Gorr the God Butcher follows in the footsteps of his comic book counterpart, it could actually be him who takes this role. As for his ultimate goal, it’s been presumed from the start that what Gorr wants is for all gods to die. However, if going from planet to planet is too tedious, time travel could turn out to be the solution. How he can accomplish this is unclear, but if Loki is any indication, he doesn’t have to rely on the same methods as the Avengers.

In the movie, they had to employ the Quantum Realm, but it’s important to note that this may not be the only way; it was just the only way they knew about. Given the number of problems that the TVA deals with on a daily basis, there’s a good chance that there are all sorts of ways to traverse the timestream and affect both the past and the future. Gorr’s adventures in space could provide him with the means of just doing that. In the comics, the blood of the Time Gods made this feasible, but in the MCU, it could be Loki’s Time-Keepers or at least a group that’s on the same level as them in terms of power and status.

Once that happens, Gorr the God Butcher can pursue younger and weaker versions of gods like Odin (Anthony Hopkins), Thor, Zeus (Russell Crowe), and more. If and when present-day Thor finds out what’s going on, he could follow him through the timestream, retrieve Mjolnir, and take the fight to Gorr, who could use an MCU incarnation of the Godbomb to complete his crusade against the gods. It may take an alliance of gods and heroes–Thor, Lady Sif, Jane Foster’s Thor, and the Guardians of the Galaxy–for Gorr to finally fall in Thor: Love and Thunder.

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