How Thor Ragnarok Set Up The Death Of The Franchise (And Its Characters)
It's called "Ragnarok" for a reason.
The title of the movie should already give it away: Ragnarok, in Norse Mythology, is called the "twilight of the gods", which signals the end of an era, with figures like Odin, Thor, and Loki all biting the dust in some way or another. Heck, their villain is literally the goddess of death! Death, endings, resolutions, are all part of the film's central theme. But beyond the symbolism, it's also not hard to spot that much of what made up the six-year Shakespearean fantasy film franchise have also come to an end, from Mjolnir's destruction to Thor's companions dying violently to Odin's rule ending with his death, and even Asgard itself being completely destroyed.
Audiences even saw a resolution to Thor and Loki's enmity, the two of them making peace with each other without needing Loki to suffer through another (fake) death.
When you add that to the shock ending of Ragnarok, with Thanos's ship descending on the last of Asgard's refugees, and hints from the Infinity War trailer that that particular encounter isn't bound to end well, you get a Thor that's lost everything that was left of his old home, and a Loki who's forced to hand the tesseract over to Thanos, presumably to preserve his own life.
If their previous brotherly reconciliation is to mean anything, however, and if Loki's reluctance is to be believed, it's not hard to imagine the trickster joining his brother in a last stand against Thanos and his Black Order, or in the very least, providing Thor the tools and information to go against them. Loki dying while fighting on his brother's side would be a poetic end to his arc, though the fact that his death never really sticks might hint at his presence further down the line. Thor, meanwhile, will fight to the last for all he has left in the world: the Earth, which he's sworn to protect, more so now that Asgard, his first home, is gone.
With Hemsworth's contract ending after Avengers 4 and no talk of a followup Thor film to come, there'll be big shoes to fill in the absence of a franchise that filled the niche Thor once did - the jarring tonal shift of the third marking an end to Shakespearean high fantasy in space that, in many ways, worked as a genre film, separate from Marvel's larger universe. The fact that many fans have taken the number of films in a franchise as a metric for whether their titular hero is going to die in Infinity War lends credence to the idea that this might be the last time we'll see Thor and his godly might in action again.
Who knows? Maybe we'll get that Valkyrie film everyone's been asking for. Maybe Lady Sif takes the reins after Thor's death, being the only surviving Asgardian member of the franchise's major cast. One thing's for sure - if Marvel wants to stay fresh, they can't lock themselves away from the multi-genre appeal that made Phase One so enjoyable.