Thor: Love And Thunder Outpaces Ragnarok With $300 Million Worldwide Opening

Thor: Love and Thunder opened this weekend, and it had a massive start. The movie pulled in $143 million in the US and $159 million from international markets for a global start of $302 million, according to Deadline.

For comparison, Thor: Ragnarok made $122.75 million for its stateside opening in 2017. That movie went on to earn $315 million in the US and $539 internationally for a global final result of $854 million.

Love and Thunder is now the 12th biggest opening all time for an MCU movie, just behind Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2. ($146.5 million US debut).

Taika Waititi returns to direct Love and Thunder, and in a push to help expand the movie's potential reach even more, it adds new cast members such as Natalie Portman as Jane Foster and Christian Bale as the villain, Gorr the God Butcher.

Love and Thunder isn't getting as strong reviews as Ragnarok, but it's aggregate review score on sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes is higher than 2013's Thor: The Dark World, for what it's worth.

The story picks up after the events of Avengers: Endgame, with Thor having an existential crisis and seeking inner peace before getting pulled back into the fight against Bale's Gorr the God Butcher. Bale revealed in an interview that a scene involving his character and self-mutilation was deemed "too extreme" for a family-friendly movie, so it was cut.

For more, check out GameSpot's Thor: Love and Thunder review.