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The MCU has raised the bar of success so high that even a film that earned a whopping $760 million across the globe is still viewed as one of the franchise’s biggest goofs. Yes, Thor: Love and Thunder might have killed it at the box office, but its less-than-stellar critical reception and savage appraisal from fans have doomed it to linger down among the least-liked MCU entries, ironically alongside its forsaken forebear, Thor: The Dark World.
Marvel folks have picked apart every facet of this film in the past year and a bit since it thundered into theaters, but there’s surprisingly still one mystery that is mystifying a lot of people. Specifically, the question of how Mjolnir is able to reassemble itself in Love and Thunder, when it was content to remain in bits through Ragnarok and didn’t even reconstitute itself when Thor desperately needed a weapon in Avengers: Infinity War. As one viral Reddit post asked:
Given that Mjolnir’s sentience is a major revelation in Love and Thunder, this is a fair question, although it does have to be said that the movie itself provides an acceptable explanation. “The point was that Thor invoked it with the power to do that for the sake of Jane,” commented one user. However, this then provoked the response, “But if it had the power to do it for Jane, why couldn’t it do it for Thor?” The answer to this, though, is of course: “Because it didn’t have an oath to do that.”
As another commenter explained, “If [T]hor realized his true powers, he could have. He kinda did it by accident for Jane. He is still early in his learning phase.” Aw, bless the little guy. “Just a wee lad of 1500,” quipped someone else.
So, technically, the solution to this mystery is there in the movie itself, but any confusion is more than acceptable considering the changing rules of what Mjolnir can and can’t do and also of the concept of Thor’s evolving abilities. As one comic book reader helpfully elaborated, “Thor inheriting the Odin-Force after Odin’s death, and becoming even more powerful than Odin ever was, is a running theme in the comics. The movies have done a poor job at explaining how his magic works.”
Who knows if director Taika Waititi plans to address this in the Thor 5 that he’s threatening to make.