By no stretch of the imagination is Thor: Love and Thunder the least favorite of all the Thor films. Even with a $250 million budget, the movie landed on a number of worst of the year lists. Now people are bemoaning a seemingly senseless plot point in the movie.
Over on the Marvel Studios subreddit, someone pointed out that Thor lost his eye in Ragnarok, but got it back early in Love and Thunder. What was the point of losing it then, they asked?
“Serious question, was there any reason thor lost his eye in Ragnarok if he just got a new one so early in his next appearance?” It’s a good question and one that deserves an answer. There were quite a few theories about this.
The most upvoted comment said the eyepatch “kept falling off” during the filming of the movie so the the original plan was to just use CGI to fill it in.
“Rather than use up the CGI budget they added this part in reshoots to give Thor a new eye, even it probably been cheaper and looked better to just add a strap to the eyepatch.”
A few people pointed out that the eyepatch looks killer and one said it “served as a good reminder and visualization for what the character has been through. I’m disappointed that it got reverted so quickly.”
There’s another line of that the eyepatch was intentionally supposed to make Thor look like Odin.
“Which was the entire reason for it occurring. He was becoming Odin,” someone commented. “But they seemed to have dumped that logical path. Although he does have a daughter that enjoys killing now.”
Someone else pointed out Thor’s other more Odin-like actions, like how he “bestowed his own blessing on Mjolnir (unwittingly, but still)” and “tapped into the Odinforce (I think) to turn a bunch of children into lightning-spewing warriors in his latest movie.”
“The transformation into Odin is progressing nicely,” they said.
There’s also the fact that Thor went through something kind of similar when he became overweight Thor. One commenter said that when Thor “loses” his eye he “immediately gets it back” and when he gets “fat and depressed” he immediately gets “shredded and happy.”
“Thor: Whatever happens is reversed thus making it feel cheap and inconsequential in his story and character arc,” they said.
The lesson here could be that Love and Thunder is simply a bad movie with or without the eyepatch plot hole. That does seem to be the easiest explanation.