‘Thor’ Grosses $143 Million in Opening Weekend

Everyone knew Thor: Love And Thunder would debut at the box office doing some numbers. Early projections had it sitting somewhere right around $150 million, but a final total of $143 million isn’t too shabby either. The movie is no Endgame or Infinity War, but those were major cultural events on their own. For a standalone story, $143 million is nothing to sneeze at.

Thor: Love And Thunder has brought in a good bit less than Jurassic World: Dominion or Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t overtake them as its run continues. If we’re talking about the release on a worldwide scale, it actually surpassed projections. The movie is surely close to breaking even already, with worldwide grosses so far around $300 million that went into its production and marketing costs with its debut.

If there’s one thing that Marvel fans can’t get enough of, it’s the multiverse or other crossovers. Thor: Love And Thunder doesn’t really have any of those components. That could be one reason it didn’t open as big as Spider-Man: No Way Home or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse Of Madness. Or it’s possible that audiences are souring on Taika Waititi just a little bit. Love and Thunder has a 68 percent on Rotten Tomatoes for the time being, which while not bad, ranks on the lower end of Marvel movie reviews.

A few audiences have claimed that the movie undercuts a lot of the tragedy in the film with comedy. That being said, a lot of Marvel films try to do that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s also true that by Waititii’s own admission, Thor is undergoing a midlife crisis in this movie. If superheroes are power fantasies, as so many media analysts have claimed, maybe that’s a part of the problem. Do people want to see an emotionally fragile superhero?