Thor will not appear in the forthcoming Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 — and he was never intended to. That’s according to writer/director James Gunn, who has been working on the story for Guardians 3 since before Thor joined up with the Guardians in Avengers: Endgame. His comments, made on Twitter, come in response to a podcast clip from Barstool Sports, in which hosts expressed disappointment that the Thor/Guardians thread was picked up in Thor: Love and Thunder instead of a Gunn-directed Guardians movie. They incorrectly assumed that the original plan for Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 included a lot of Thor.
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Gunn said that wasn’t the case, and in fact that Thor was never set to appear in the movie. The filmmaker was originally writing Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 for a 2020 release, but was briefly fired from the project in 2018. By the time he was reinstated in 2019, Gunn had already agreed to write and direct The Suicide Squad for Warner Bros., meaning that Disney was forced to wait their turn.
That’s the source of the confusion, apparently, with one of the hosts suggesting that Thor would have been the Guardians’ “sidekick” in a third installment, had Gunn never been fired.
“I appreciate the love but Thor was never going to be in Vol 3,” Gunn tweeted back in response to a clip from the podcast.
That makes a ton of sense. While it might have been slightly jarring for Thor to take off with the Guardians at the end of Endgame, and then no longer be with them at the start of the next movie that featured the characters, it arguably makes more sense than trying to cram a new character (especially a popular one that would suck up a lot of air in the room) into the third act of a trilogy.
Of course, since Gunn was likely not working on Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 when Endgame was made, it’s possible that the opposite was true: a relationship was established between Thor and the Guardians, so that they had a place to go if their own movie ended up delayed indefinitely. Even that is pure sepculation, though.
The Guardians’ story will wrap up next May, with a Holiday Special in between. There have been some suggestions that Thor — or at least his goats — might pop up in the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, but that’s a bit of a different story, since it’s likely to be a one-off with questionable ties to larger continuity.
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Image Courtesy of Warner Bros./Paramount Pictures
