Chris Hemsworth Fly-In Clarified Thor’s Radical Ragnarok Shift
Chris Hemsworth had to get on a plane in 2018 because Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus wanted answers about where Thor was headed after Thor: Ragnarok. The writers of Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame were hearing that the character’s tone had changed five months after Thor: Ragnarok opened in November 2017.
2018 Meeting With Hemsworth
Stephen McFeely said, “We had to fly in Hemsworth and Taika Waititi.” He said the team asked, “Do you guys understand what we’re doing with this movie?” and then pressed harder: “Are you making him an idiot? I don’t understand.”
That exchange mattered because the Avengers writers were breaking story while Waititi was already shaping Thor: Ragnarok. A character that had been built across one set of films was being reworked in another, so the people writing the next two Avengers films wanted to know whether the comedy was still carrying Thor forward or flattening him.
Ragnarok’s Losses
McFeely’s concern narrowed once he described the losses built into the film. “In Ragnarok he loses his kingdom, his father, his sister, and his eyeball,” he said. He added that the writers thought about what would happen if any one of them sustained that much loss and failure.
His answer was blunt: “The result would be that a person would get incredibly depressed and probably retreat from the world.” That is the friction point underneath the comic turn. Thor’s new tone was not being read in isolation; it had to hold up against the damage the character had already taken on screen.
Waititi’s Comic Pain
McFeely later described the performance in Thor: Ragnarok as “a comedic performance with a lot of pain behind it.” That reading gave the Avengers writers a cleaner path for Infinity War and Endgame, where Hemsworth’s Thor followed the radical shift rather than being reset back to his earlier version.
For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple: the Thor change was not a solo-director flourish that stayed inside one movie. It had to be negotiated across the shared universe, and the writers working on the next two Avengers films went straight to Hemsworth and Waititi before building around it.
