How Avengers: Endgame’s “Lebowski Thor” Rounded Out Thor’s MCU Arc

Depicting the mighty Thor (Chris Hemsworth) as the plump, bathrobe-wearing “Lebowski Thor” was [...]

By Cameron Bonomolo

Depicting the mighty Thor (Chris Hemsworth) as the plump, bathrobe-wearing "Lebowski Thor" was an opportunity for Avengers: Endgame screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely to round out the Asgardian Avenger's arc — no pun intended.

"Because we had this five-year break, and we wanted to push all the characters to an extreme over the course of that five years, we kept coming back to, it was sort of a knee jerk, 'Thor's on a mission of vengeance, he's angry,'" Markus told SYFY WIRE.

"But he was on one in the last movie, and he failed. And you don't just go in for more vengeance, at that point. What would any of us do when faced with that much failure? You wouldn't want to do anything but drink and try to forget that it ever happened. And so we didn't set out and go, 'Thor needs to be overweight and in a bathrobe,' but he has gone to ground, in a hole, and is drowning his sorrows. And he evolved into, effectively, Lebowski Thor from there."

The five-year time jump that followed Thor's decapitation of Thanos (Josh Brolin) — a reaction to the Avengers' inability to prevent and then reverse the snap that halved the universe in 2018, and Thor's own arrogant failure in Wakanda — gave Markus and McFeely "the chance to do something like that to all six of the original Avengers, and that's why we did it," added McFeely.

"And, by the way, we already had a guy on a mission of vengeance, right? So let's not take that away from Hawkeye."

"It's also just looking for symmetry over the course of the whole MCU for everybody," Markus said.

"Steve misses his dance and gets a dance, Tony saves his own life and gives it up. Thor has a very memorable shirtless scene in Thor 1, and we wanted to give him another memorable shirtless scene in this one to sort of round out the arc."

Hemsworth next returns alongside Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson in Thor: Love and Thunder, out November 5, 2021.

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