Avengers 4: What will happen to Thor as Phase 3 ends?
Warning: Contains spoilers for Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Infinity War.
Avengers 4 will bring an end to Marvel Phase 3, the first era of the MCU, and will see us wave goodbye to some of its major stars as Marvel Studios welcome in some new blood.
With Chris Evans expected to bow out as Captain America and Robert Downey Jr potentially also calling it quits as Iron Man, what does Avengers 4 hold for the hammer-wielding, Asgardian member of the Avengers? Can we really permanently lose three major elements of this superteam in one grand finale, with Chris Hemsworth stepping down as well?
Before that happens, there's plenty for this deity to do if the good guys are going to reverse the destruction caused by the Infinity Gauntlet.
Scores to settle from Avengers 3
While Thanos' destructive snap of the fingers had consequences for the entire universe, wiping out half of all life in it, Thor was on the receiving end of the Titan's vicious nature from the very start.
Avengers: Infinity War picked up where the events of Thor: Ragnarok left off, with Thor (Hemsworth) and the other Asgardians in a bad way. The God of Thunder could only kill his sister Hela (Cate Blanchett) by triggering the apocalyptic Ragnarok and destroying his home. Bummer.
Having escaped in a spaceship with the remnants of his people, there was to be no let up for Thor. Thanos opened Infinity War by boarding the ship, stealing the Space Stone from the Tesseract and killing both his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Heimdall (Idris Elba).
It could be argued that Thor had plenty of chance to get his revenge. Using his newly forged axe Stormbreaker (his hammer Mjolnir having been destroyed in Ragnarok) to attack Thanos, he almost delivered the killing blow. But as the Titan himself pointed out, he should have gone for a headshot and not tried to have the final word. Big mistake.
Will he be feeling a little sorry for himself, given that half the universe has been destroyed because of his moment of hubris? Well, he did a lot of soul-searching in Thor: Ragnarok when his sister kicked his butt and destroyed his beloved hammer, so perhaps he'll be more focused on the rage he needs to actually kill Thanos. Besides, Star-Lord arguably messed up in a bigger way, given that the team on the planet Titan were about to nick the glove in question.
Axe attack
At least Thor was still standing at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. The as yet untitled sequel – we're still calling it Avengers 4 for brevity – will start with a huge number of the Avengers roster as dust in the wind.
Thanos' snap left Black Widow, Bruce Banner, Captain America, M'Baku, Okoye, Rocket Racoon, War Machine and Thor alive on the Wakandan battlefield, so we won't need the Asgardian to magically pop back into existence.
That's good, because we were a little disappointed at how quickly Infinity War solved the issue of his missing eye – he looked so cool with an eye patch and it was a proper throwback to his father Odin (also, Babylon 5 did exactly the same thing with G'Kar, taking his eye so memorably only to replace it too casually with an electronic substitute).
He'll be keen to get another shot at Thanos with his awesome new axe Stormbreaker, but everything we've seen so far suggests he'll actually be stepping back into the past to solve this crisis. He's already been pictured with his original luscious locks and armour in on-set photos that suggest a flashback scene, while the whole Avengers team has been spotted reliving the battle of New York from the first film (with Ant-Man in tow).
Thor will definitely be accessorising as part of that trip to the past. The team all sport the same natty wrist gadgets that could very well be time-travel devices, given that they don't look a million miles different to a similar item used by Cable in Deadpool 2.
Yet given the presence of Ant-Man, this could actually be a visit to an alternate dimension, courtesy of those amazing Pym particles. Does undoing the deaths in another reality mean they still occurred in our reality? Expect your head to hurt a little at the end of Avengers 4 if either of these theories is correct.
Comic-book comparisons
We're not expecting Thor to bite the big one in Avengers 4, mainly because our money is on Cap and Shell Head (AKA Iron Man) laying down their lives, and three of the original team saying goodbye for good would be super bleak. Besides, he's only just got that new axe Stormbreaker and we want to see that thing in action some more.
If Chris Hemsworth does decide to bow out at this point, there's already an interesting twist on the character from the comics that would shake the role up. Step forward Thor, the Goddess of Thunder. While it's unlikely we'd see Natalie Portman's Jane Foster take up that mantle (she was eventually revealed to be the Goddess of Thunder in the comics), there is another candidate standing by.
In Thor: Ragnarok, Tessa Thompson's Scrapper 142 turned out to be The Valkyrie. This character is a member of Odin's elite Valkyrior, and as one of those legendary warriors she's a match for Hemsworth's hard-drinking Asgardian Thor in every way. In our eyes, she'd be more than worthy to wield a thunderous weapon.
Avengers 4 will be released in the UK on April 26, 2019, and in the US on May 3, 2019.
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