Love And Thunder’ Review Scores Are Surprisingly Low Compared To ‘Ragnarok’

Reviews are currently coming in as we speak for Thor Love and Thunder, the second joint project between Chris Hemsworth’s Thor and beloved director Taika Waititi after Thor Ragnarok.

But something appears to have missed the mark this time around, and scores are much lower than not just Ragnarok, but most other Marvel movies. It currently has a “bad for Marvel” score of 74%, with 57 reviews counted (I will update this as more come in).

Update: it’s now dropped to a 68% with 97 reviews in.

MORE FROM FORBESReview: ‘Love And Thunder’ Is A ‘Thor’ LoserBy Scott Mendelson

That puts it exactly tied with the recent Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which has the same score but of course, made loads of money anyway. But here’s how it falls in the list of the “worst scoring” MCU movies on Rotten Tomatoes, the bottom 10:

• Iron Man 3 – 79%
• Captain America: The First Avenger – 79%
• Thor – 77%
• Avengers: Age of Ultron – 76%
• Multiverse of Madness – 74%
• Iron Man 2 – 72%
• Thor Love and Thunder – 68%
• The Incredible Hulk – 67%
• Thor: The Dark World – 66%
• Eternals – 47%

Thor Ragnarok, by comparison has a 93%, and is the fourth highest scored MCU movie ever.

While I do not always agree with critics (that Eternals score is way, way too low), this does put it below Thor 1, which was hardly Thor’s finest hour, but the surprise here is not really the score, it’s that a Taika Waititi movie is getting this score, with the man not only responsible for Ragnarok, but he’s just a comedy genius with his other projects like What We Do in the Shadows, and he did work Lucasfilm liked so much on The Mandalorian they gave him a Star Wars movie to write.

Again, in general, a 74% is not a bad score, but when it puts you tied for being in the bottom 5 Marvel movies out of almost thirty, that’s significant. It being the second film to hover around that score this year also indicates that critics may be souring on the Marvel formula a bit. I’d expect fan scores to be higher. Multiverse of Madness, for instance, has an 85% audience score.

A lot of the criticism I’ve seen around Thor Love and Thunder so far seems centered on Thor himself, that the film treats him like a joke, but one that’s not funny enough to be worth sacrificing his character. I’m not going to read too many reviews, as I want to form my own opinions about the movie before having a bunch of narratives running through my head, but I remain pretty surprised at the initial reaction here compared to Ragnarok.

I am sure the film will do wonders at the box office and audience scores seem destined to be higher, but we’ll have to see how it goes. I’ll keep track of score fluctuations as more reviews come in.

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