With Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness now in theaters, Marvel fans can begin looking forward to the next MCU movie: Thor: Love and ThunderThat highly-anticipated film, features the returns of Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster, now with the powers of Thor. Now that we’re in mid-May, the sequel is less than two months away.

Director Taika Waititi previewed the movie for Entertainment Weekly, and tempered audiences’ expectations that this movie is a bit more serious and a bit less “like a party,” than its predecessor, Thor: Ragnarok. While the film is “still fun,” Waititi explained, it is thematically “about something a bit deeper than the last film.”

He added:

It's not a serious film, and it's not a drama, but we do deal with ideas that I think a lot of humans deal with — universal themes about love and loss and our place in the world. Everyone sort of asks this question in the film: What is your purpose? What is the reason that you're a hero, and what do you do when you have these powers? ...It's sort of like a midlife crisis film, really.

Those ideas are reflected in the first Thor: Love and Thunder, which sees Hemsworth’s Thor searching for his place in the universe in the wake of Avengers: Endgame.

Waititi also claimed that Love and Thunder’s ideas have a lot of relevance right now “while the world is still healing from this pandemic” when we should we be asking ourselves “Are we doing the right thing, and are we doing all we can in the world?” Ponder that question while you are reading this blog post about an upcoming Marvel movie about a space god who can zap people with lightning.

Thor: Love and Thunder is scheduled to open exclusively in theaters on July 8.

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