Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely were already thinking about where Thor was headed in 2018 when they were breaking the story for Avengers: Infinity War, and the answer was tied to what Taika Waititi was doing in Thor: Ragnarok. The writers said they had heard rumblings that Ragnarok would give the character a very different tone, with Thor becoming more comical, and they felt they needed to get on the same page before the next Marvel films locked in that direction.

“We had to fly in Hemsworth and Taika Waititi,” McFeely said, describing the effort to make sure everyone was working from the same understanding of the character. He said the conversation came after word spread from Australia: “Do you guys understand what we’re doing with this movie?” His response was blunt. “No, I don’t know what you mean. Are you making him an idiot? I don’t understand.”

The concern was not just about a punchline or a costume change. McFeely said that in Ragnarok, Thor loses his kingdom, his father, his sister and his eyeball, and the team had to think about what would happen if any one person went through that much loss and failure. The answer, he said, would not be swagger. It would be deep depression and a likely retreat from the world.

That is why Chris Hemsworth’s performance in Ragnarok, followed by Infinity War and Endgame, feels less like a sharp reinvention than a natural extension of a larger character arc. Thor: Ragnarok opened in November 2017, five months before Avengers: Infinity War, and it radically reset the character’s tone. By the time the later films arrived, the creative team was not improvising around that change. It was carrying it forward.

The friction in the story was real: the earlier Avengers films had presented Thor as a more traditional heroic figure, while Ragnarok pushed him into a more comic register. But the writers’ account suggests the shift was never meant to be random or disposable. It was a deliberate recalibration, and the meetings with Hemsworth and Waititi were about making sure that the next phase of the role still made emotional sense. The larger arc that followed through Infinity War and Endgame now looks like the payoff, not the correction.