After only being the last minute surprise in the teaser for Thor: Love and Thunder, Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster (aka Mighty Thor) takes center stage in the official trailer.
In the teaser we see Thor’s initial reaction to Mjolnir, only for it to resist his pull and fly into Jane’s fist, leading to the big reveal. The new Jane-centric trailer shows us more about how her character has evolved, including a one-off line that reveals exactly what Jane’s been up to since we last saw her.
In the trailer, Jane and Thor finally have a moment to talk after the battle that reunited them, and Jane brings up how long it’s been since they saw each other. “What’s it been... like three, four years?” Jane asks.
Thor replies, “Eight years, seven months, and six days, give or take.”
At first blush this looks like a joke about Thor holding a torch for Jane. But if you think about it further, it actually reveals a lot about Jane’s character. Why would they make such drastically different conclusions about their time apart? The answer is the Blip.
In the MCU, people who returned after the Blip had no sense of the years that passed, which would explain why Jane underestimated how long it’s been since she’s seen Thor. We’ve seen how being Blipped affected various people in the MCU. For Monica Rambeau, it meant mourning her mother and experiencing some suspiciously mutant-like powers. How will being Blipped affect Jane?
Thor: Love and Thunder has the opportunity to use the Blip as a convenient way to explain Jane’s new abilities. Just as Monica Rambeau came back with powers, maybe the way Jane comes back after the Blip could lead to her becoming the true bearer of Mjolnir.
Regardless of whether the Blip will factor into the way Jane finds her powers, the MCU has been careful to show just how being Blipped has affected each and every character. If we had time to see how Dr. Strange’s coworker Dr. Nicodemus West dealt with losing his brother and his cats, we have time to delve into how the tragedy affected Jane.
But considering where Jane Foster is now, she may be the rare example of a MCU character not losing something because of the Blip, but gaining something. Maybe this “hard reset” is just what Jane needed to seek what she was truly worth of: The hammer that changed her life in the first place.
Thor: Love and Thunder premieres July 8, 2022.
