THOR.

A DECADE OF FALSE STARTS, THEN AN UNLIKELY HIRE

WHY MARVEL HANDED A COSMIC BLOCKBUSTER TO THE HENRY V DIRECTOR

Thor had circled Hollywood for years before Kenneth Branagh took it on: Sam Raimi pitched a version in the early 1990s, Mark Protosevich wrote a draft for Marvel in the mid-2000s, and Matthew Vaughn was briefly attached to direct before leaving the project in 2008. Branagh, best known for Shakespeare adaptations including Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet, was an unexpected choice for a film about an alien god of thunder, and he’s said he wasn’t sure why Marvel called him.

“I couldn’t tell you why they thought of me. I had just come off three films that hadn’t done so well at the box office… The thing to remember was that Marvel wasn’t what it is now. Sure, Iron Man had been a huge hit. But Hulk with Edward Norton hadn’t been what they hoped.”

Kenneth Branagh, on being hired to direct Thor

What won him the job, by his own account, wasn’t a formal pitch meeting so much as a few pages he wrote unprompted: “I basically had auditioned for it with three or four pages that I wrote. And that changed how people saw me.” He’s pointed to a personal connection with the character, too, recalling Thor as the Marvel comic he actually read growing up in Belfast: “I was lucky because Thor was the one I could remember from Belfast. It was the exciting one.”

THE ROLE ALMOST WENT TO SOMEONE ELSE IN HIS OWN FAMILY

CHRIS HEMSWORTH’S FIRST AUDITION FAILED, AND LIAM HEMSWORTH MADE THE FINAL FIVE

Chris Hemsworth, at the time best known for a brief role in 2009’s Star Trek and Australia’s Home and Away, didn’t land the part on his first attempt. “I think my audition sucked. I think that was the response I got,” he’s said. His younger brother Liam Hemsworth also tested for Thor around the same time and made it into the final five contenders, though casting ultimately felt, at 18, he didn’t read as credible opposite Natalie Portman.

Chris came back for a second attempt with a different attitude, framing it afterwards as pure competitiveness with his brother: “This time, I was pissed off. I didn’t care about Shakespeare anymore; swagger got me the part.” His mother read Anthony Hopkins’s lines as Odin opposite him for his original taped audition. Marvel announced Hemsworth as Thor at the same time it announced Tom Hiddleston as Loki.

A ROLE WON BY LOSING ANOTHER ONE

TOM HIDDLESTON READ FOR THOR, AND MARVEL SAW A VILLAIN INSTEAD

Hiddleston auditioned for the title role of Thor, not Loki; by his own account he never separately read for the part he ended up playing. Marvel’s brief for Thor was reportedly loose enough to be summed up as looking for actors over six feet tall with blond hair, and Hiddleston went through roughly three months of that process before the studio redirected him.

Kevin Feige has described making the pitch to Hiddleston directly, tying the decision back to the character’s role in Marvel’s own comics continuity: Feige told him that in the first issue of The Avengers comic, “the villain is Loki, and we want you to be the villain,” explaining that he wanted the film version of The Avengers to echo that original comic, where Loki’s scheming is what brings the team together in the first place.

A SCIENCE-FICTION ASGARD, BUILT FROM KIRBY AND MANDELBROT

HOW THE NINE REALMS WERE DESIGNED, AND WHY THE 3D DREW COMPLAINTS

Production designer Bo Welch built Asgard as a gleaming, amber-lit realm pitched closer to science fiction than medieval fantasy, drawing on months of Marvel concept art alongside Jack Kirby’s original Thor comics for reference. The film’s visual effects team layered in nebula imagery and Mandelbrot fractal patterns for the approach shots into Asgard, aiming for something that read as advanced and alien rather than simply mythic.

The film was shot in 2D and converted to 3D afterward in post-production, a decision that drew criticism on release for muddying Asgard’s bright, detailed visuals, with the Jotunheim battle singled out by reviewers as the sequence that suffered most from the conversion. Idris Elba’s casting as Heimdall, a figure from Norse mythology, drew a separate, more pointed backlash that Elba addressed directly at the time: “We have a man who has a flying hammer and wears horns on his head. And yet me being an actor of African descent playing a Norse god is unbelievable?” he said, pointing to Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra and Ben Kingsley playing Gandhi as precedent.

THE REWATCH

STRONG REVIEWS, A TESSERACT TEASE, AND A YEAR’S HEAD START ON THE AVENGERS

Thor opened to $65.7 million domestically and finished with $181 million in the US and $449.3 million worldwide, reviewed well enough to become one of the better-received MCU entries to that point: Rotten Tomatoes lists a 77% critics’ score, with its official consensus crediting Branagh directly for the film’s balance of tones: “A dazzling blockbuster that tempers its sweeping scope with wit, humor, and human drama, Thor is mighty Marvel entertainment.” Metacritic’s more conservative 57 reflects a wider split among individual reviews, but the film’s reputation as a confident, successful introduction of Marvel’s cosmic side held.

Jane Foster’s own line in the film, telling Erik Selvig that “magic’s just science we can’t explain yet,” citing Arthur C. Clarke by name, doubles as the film’s thesis for folding Asgard into a universe otherwise built on arc reactors and super-soldier serum. The mid-credits scene makes the connective tissue explicit: Nick Fury visits Selvig to show him the Tesseract, asking him to help “figure out how to tap it,” directly seeding the item and the team Thor would join a year later. For a first watch, Thor sits in the Marvel movies in release order guide directly after Iron Man 2, continuing Marvel Studios’ build toward The Avengers.