Since Iron Man way back in 2008, there’s been a total of 20 MCU movies (with three more coming out this year). Considering how many things can go wrong during a film’s production, it’s remarkable that there are so few genuinely bad outings among them. In my estimate, any MCU marathon would do well to skip over The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Iron Man 2 and Avengers: Age of Ultron. But then again, each of those movies have their own defenders. There is one MCU film though around which the consensus has formed that it’s genuinely bad: Thor: The Dark World.
I’ve seen it once and it was an enormously bland, forgettable experience. My vague recollections are of the climactic fight in London, Natalie Portman clearly wishing she was anywhere else and Christopher Ecclestone being completely wasted under terrible makeup and a made-up language. Now, it’s emerged that one of the people who acted in the film doesn’t even remember it.
Chris O’Dowd played Richard in The Dark World, and he was last seen taking Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster out on a date. He was asked by MTV News whether he thought that Richard had survived the Snap, and his response was priceless.
Did Chris O'Dowd (@BigBoyler) just totally forget he was in a #Thor movie??? 😂 pic.twitter.com/2kCOchbhga
— MTV NEWS (@MTVNEWS) February 5, 2019
As you can see, O’Dowd really isn’t much of an MCU fan. He doesn’t remember the name of the movie he was in, he asks whether Thor’s still going and hasn’t seen Infinity War. Amusingly, he might be one of the last people on the planet to find out that Thanos wipes out half of all life in the universe, too, reacting to the news with a shocked “what?!” Still, he’s got a funny feeling that Richard’s the kind of guy who would’ve survived.
And who knows, maybe he’s playing his cards very close to his chest about Richard’s surprise return in Avengers: Endgame? After all, there’s that mysterious gap in the lineup in the recent Super Bowl ad where a character’s clearly been edited out. Who’s to say the very particular skillset of Richard won’t come in handy when the chips are down? You heard it here first.