Eight years, seven months, and six days. That’s how much time passed since Thor (Chris Hemsworth) last saw Jane (Natalie Portman). After all that time, he still loves Jane, which is why he’s been counting the days since their “mutual dumping.” That’s not a Thor: Love and Thunder spoiler, as we’ve heard Thor mention that detail in the movie’s various trailers and promo clips. But it’s a detail that can help us determine where Thor: Love and Thunder sits on the MCU timeline.
Spoilers from the MCU Phase 4 follow below, so you’ll want to make sure you watch everything before you check out the timeline calculations below.
What is the mutual dumping, and when did it happen?
Love and Thunder mostly takes place away from Earth. Most of the action happens on alien planets, as Thor, Jane, Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), and Korg (Taika Waititi) travel around the universe to fight Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale).
That means we don’t have any clear Easter eggs to anchor Love and Thunder into the grander scheme of the MCU. We have no idea what happens on Earth during the action in Love and Thunder. As you might have guessed, Marvel goes out of its way to ignore any links to the other Avengers in Thor 4. That’s a consistent and annoying theme we’ve witnessed for most of the MCU Phase 4.
However, Thor’s love for Jane is enough to inform us of the placement of Love and Thunder in the grander MCU timeline. Before we begin, let’s remember this great mutual dumping scene from Thor: Ragnarok. We find out that Jane broke up with Thor in the clip below, with Thor explaining to Loki (Tom Hiddleston) that it was a mutual dumping.
Thor: Love and Thunder and the MCU timeline
Most of the action in Ragnarok takes place in November-December 2017. The scene above happens early in the movie, as the two brothers visit Earth to find Odin (Anthony Hopkins). Since people on the street try to console Thor about his breakup with Jane, the whole thing must have happened in the months that preceded that scene.
We don’t have a date for the mutual dumping. But we can infer it happened in the second half of 2017. For the sake of argument, let’s assume it happened between January and November of 2017.
Add eight years, seven months, and six days to that, and we end up with a July 2025 date of events. If Jane broke up with Thor in January 2017, then the Love and Thunder action takes place roughly in July-August 2025. If the mutual dumping happened closer to November 2017, then Love and Thunder’s placement on the MCU timeline slips to June-July 2026.
Whatever the case, Love and Thunder must happen well after Hawkeye, which takes place over Christmas 2024 in the MCU. After Hawkeye, we only have two other events on the MCU timeline. There’s Moon Knight, which happens at some point in 2025. And then Ms. Marvel starts at some point in fall 2025.
A missed timeline opportunity
In a best-case scenario, Love and Thunder is concurrent with some of the events of Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel. Marvel had a golden opportunity to fix some of the issues with the Egyptian gods in Moon Knight. It could have linked their inability to intervene properly on Earth to the Gorr threat in the universe. It could also have helped us determine the exact place of Love and Thunder on the timeline. But Marvel never did that.
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