How Important Were Thor’s Appearances In The Avengers Movies?

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the biggest name in entertainment, even if its popularity has started to flag. The MCU did something pretty amazing, taking its time over three Phases to create a superhero universe that felt like the comics. Marvel Studios did this by taking parts of the comics and adding to them, creating a Marvel Universe that worked for readers of the comics and new fans walking into the cinema for the first time to see what all the hype was about. While some characters were closer to their comic counterparts, some weren’t.

The best example of this was Thor. While Thor started closer to the comics, subsequent appearances, and the MCU’s more humorous tone, changed the character. Thor is a part of the Avengers’ bedrock in the comics – he’s a founding member after all – and the same can be said for the MCU version despite the differences. Thor’s journey through the MCU has been quite interesting, appearing in multiple films since his debut, and he’s played an important role in the Avengers movies. Thor introduced the Odinson to audiences, outlining his battle against his foster brother Loki. This rivalry would play into the end of Phase One – and the culmination of the first four years of the MCU – 2012’s Avengers.

The Dawn Of The Avengers

The MCU’s Phase One can be rough to watch, but Thor stands up pretty well. On Earth, Thor meets Jane Foster, her assistant Darcy Lewis, and Dr. Erik Selvig. Working with them, Thor was able to prove his worthiness and stop the Destroyer before going back to Asgard and defeating Loki. The movie’s tone wasn’t as light as later Thor films, and while no one thought it was the greatest superhero movie of all time, it was still an entertaining action romp. The movie included SHIELD, who found Mjolnir and guarded it, as well as Hawkeye, who made his first MCU appearance. Thor is also integral to understanding the biggest MCU movie of the early days of the franchise – 2012’s The Avengers.

This was Thor’s next appearance in the MCU. Loki is tasked by Thanos to get the Tesseract and is given a mind-controlling scepter to do so, which he uses to take control of Erik Selvig and Hawkeye. Thor goes to Earth to stop his brother and runs afoul of Captain America and Iron Man. Viewers got the patented first superhero meeting between the three, which means they fought. Eventually, those three joined up with SHIELD – along with the Hulk and Black Widow, freed Hawkeye during an attack on the Helicarrier, and the Avengers were born.

The movie ended with the climactic Battle Of New York, where Loki led the Chitauri, Thanos’s alien army, to try to get the Tesseract from the Helicarrier. The Avengers was loved by everyone. It’s the culmination of Phase One and showed just how successful the MCU Method – introducing the players before giving them a big team-up movie – worked.

The Avengers grossed over a billion dollars, allowing the MCU to join the highest-grossing film franchises of all time. Thor played a huge role in the movie. While an argument can be made that he was still the arrogant god that Odin tried to punish, most fans didn’t put too much thought into it and just loved the character. The fight between Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man is still a banger of a fight, and Thor has some great lines in the movie.

One thing that gets forgotten about The Avengers is that it also uses the comics as a basis, with an MCU twist. In the comics, Loki’s assault on Earth brought the Avengers together. While the team was different from the MCU one and the reasoning behind Loki’s attack was different, it was comic accurate enough that comic fans had a little smile at the similarities. However, it can be argued that staying comic-accurate was the biggest problem with Thor in the MCU.

A Troubling New Age of Ultron

The Avengers: Age Of Ultron was the sequel to The Avengers and everyone had high hopes for it. However, the movie’s biggest problem is that it seemed to forget the lessons of Phase One. The movie introduced multiple important characters – Scarlet Witch, Vision, Klaw – as well as Ultron and Quicksilver. The movie was overstuffed with plot and the tone swung wildly between humor and world-ending stakes. Iron Man was still dealing with his PTSD and was given visions of a terrible future, and Thor went on his quest to find out the future. Ultron wasn’t anything like the comics, instead a wisecracking android genocidal enemy who seemingly existed just to give viewers a big fight at the end. The early MCU succeeded because it paced itself well. Age Of Ultron is interesting because it’s a long movie that feels long, but also seems to never do enough with the important parts of the film.

Age Of Ultron was a huge step backward for the MCU. Guardians Of The Galaxy had dropped the summer before and MCU fans had just gotten a team movie unlike anything they had seen up to that point. Guardians Of The Galaxy took everything that Avengers did and improved on it and was all the more impressive because it was able to set up its team within itself. There was hope that Age Of Ultron could improve upon GotG and take back the crown of the MCU’s greatest team, but that didn’t happen. Thor’s place in the movie is endemic to its problem. Thor is great during the opening party scenes, but his subplot in the movie – trying to find out the future that is worrying everyone in the movie – was uninspired and spoke to the bloated nature of Age Of Ultron. Thor’s performance in the movie wasn’t anything special, with the best part of the movie for him being the scene where everyone is trying to lift Mjolnir as he watches.

Many comic fans had hoped for the movie to re-enact the classic scene from Ultron Unlimited, where a beat-up Thor leads the Avengers in the battle against Ultron, telling the android, “Ultron, we would have words with thee,” a scene that would have looked amazing on the big screen and would have been better than anything else in the movie. Age Of Ultron is something of a disappointment, but at this point in the MCU, fans were used to disappointing Thor movies, as Phase Two’s Thor: The Dark World wasn’t well-received either. However, a change was on the horizon and it would lead Thor into Avengers: Infinity War.

Thor wasn’t a part of the movie many fans consider Avengers 2.5 – 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. That movie broke the Avengers and introduced the Superhero Registration Act, seeing Captain America, Falcon, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, and Black Panther Forming their unit. Thor: Ragnarök combined several Thor comic plotlines – an attack by Hela and the final war against the fire demon Surtur – with the classic Hulk story Planet Hulk.

Thor, Hulk, and Loki worked together to escape the planet of Sakaar and battle Hela, who had taken over Asgard. They only defeated her by releasing the fire demon Surtur and destroying Asgard in the process. They all evacuated on a spaceship, but their journey wasn’t long as Thanos quickly found them, which led directly into Avengers: Infinity War.

Thor Shined In The Best Avengers Movie

Avengers: Infinity War kicked off with Thanos and the Black Order attacked the surviving the Asgardians to get the Infinity Stones they carried. This was the first time that Thanos got to fight anyone, and he made short work of Thor and Hulk, also killing Loki. Thor’s plot in the movie would be getting a new weapon to replace Mjolnir after the Guardians of the Galaxy found the surviving Asgardians, which was destroyed in Ragnarök, alongside Groot and Rocket, and revenge. Thor would gain the ax Stormbreaker, going to Earth during Thanos’s attack. Thor ended up driving his ax into Thanos’s chest just as he was completing the Infinity Gauntlet, which led to the classic line, “You should have aimed for the head,” from Thanos. Thanos killed half the universe with Thor standing there, blaming himself for not killing Thanos when he had a chance.

Avengers: Infinity War is the pinnacle of the MCU. The movie delivered everything that fans of the MCU could want. There was action, payoffs to years of storytelling, and the best action scenes in superhero movies ever. Thor played a large and important role in the film, his story starting an arc that would get paid off in the next movie. Infinity War is often looked at as the Thanos and Iron Man show, which is valid, but Thor did get his best role in an Avengers movie, or at least the beginning of his best story. Thor had plenty of great scenes and the end of the battle against Thanos is a defining moment for the character. Avengers: Infinity War was a pop cultural moment and a success like no other. Thor played a huge role in that; for many fans, it’s the best MCU appearance for the God of Thunder.

Avengers: Endgame Gave Fans Top-Notch Thor Moments

Avengers: Endgame was the grand finale of the MCU and Thor played a big role in the movie. Thor is among the Avengers who were at the Compound when Captain Marvel brought Iron Man and Nebula to Earth. He was among the team that went to find Thanos and the Gauntlet and was the one to behead Thanos. Five years later, Hulk recruited Thor from New Asgard, where the God of Thunder had abdicated his responsibilities as king of the Asgardians so he could drink and forget his failures, playing Fortnite with Miek and Korg. Thor and Rocket went back to Asgard before his mother Freya’s death to get the Aether. Freya found Thor and their conversation gave him the confidence he needed to call the past’s Mjolnir to him.

Thor returned to the present, the Gauntlet was reconstructed, Hulk snapped everyone back to life, and Thor walked out with Iron Man and Captain America to face off against an alternate past Thanos, allowing Captain America to use Mjolnir in the battle. Thor witnessed the death of his friend Iron Man and ended up leaving the Earth with the Guardians of the Galaxy, a friendship that had begun in the previous Avengers film.

Avengers: Endgame was another watershed moment in the MCU’s history, but calling it a great movie is a road too far. The time heist plotline was a strange choice, and that caused a lot of the story to fall flat. However, the last battle of the movie helped buoy the whole affair. Thor’s plot line in Endgame was quite important to the character’s development and one of the more satisfying arcs in the movie. Between Infinity War and Endgame, Thor got a lot of character work and his plots combined the serious and more humorous elements of the character. Endgame isn’t as bad as some of the other Avengers movies, but compared to Infinity War it was a bit overcomplicated. However, Thor’s plot line in Endgame is one of the reasons that the movie is still generally beloved.

Thor’s Avengers Showcased His Difficult MCU Road

Thor has decades of lore from the comics and the MCU did its best to incorporate all of that. However, the MCU is also a very different place from Marvel’s comic universe. MCU fans didn’t want noble warrior Thor, which is why his first two movies are so very different from his last two, which are also different from his appearances in Avengers movies. The MCU was known for stable characterization – to the point of keeping most of the characters from ever hitting three-dimensional status – but Thor rarely had this. Thor’s journey through the MCU seems to be trying to find ways to make the character work, reworking him for nearly every appearance. The Avengers movies showed the push and pull of Thor’s journey through the MCU, as the movies’ portrayal of him yo-yo’ed from arrogant warrior to goofy comic relief.

The Avengers movies were the heart of the MCU and Thor was an integral part of those movies. Thor has a lot of memorable scenes in those movies and his arc through the last two movies was a highlight of both of them. Overall, Thor’s time in the MCU can be looked at as a failure. There was no stable characterization for him, and the four Thor movies are home to two of the worst MCU movies of them all. However, Thor in the Avengers franchise was one of the more entertaining parts of those films. However, much like his solo films, Thor was all over the place as a character, but it worked much better with the ensemble of the team than it did when he was on his own in his solo films.