MCU: Every Thor Appearance Ranked Worst To Best

And so we've reached the film that did Thor the most justice, last year's Thor: Ragnarok, the third - and hopefully not final - part of the hero's solo franchise. Between his lackluster outing in The Dark World and his mishandling in Age of Ultron, it's hard to deny that Thor's popularity was nowhere near as strong as Iron Man and Captain America's, but Ragnarok changed that in one fell swoop.

Despite scene-stealers like Hulk, Loki, Valkyrie, Grandmaster, and Hela populating the film, Thor finally felt like the best part of his own franchise, Chris Hemsworth allowed to bring his natural sense of humor to the proceedings in a way that none of the past films had truly capitalized on, thanks in no small part to director Taika Waititi's willingness to blow everything we knew up and go crazy. Along the way, he lost friends, his father, his hammer, and his home, but he also proved just why he deserved to be the new king, embracing the true power and responsibility of his role as the God of Thunder.

In all ways, Ragnarok reinvented the character without completely ignoring his journey to date, unleashing his power in ways we'd never seen and giving him a personality makeover that Hemsworth clearly relished from beginning to end, and even though it took over half a decade to happen, we finally got Thor in all his glory in a way that immediately elevated his popularity and did right by the Avenger.