Thor: Love and Thunder hit theaters last week. But critics’ middling reviews (“disappointingly shallow” is how our own reviewer described it) may have you holding out until the film moves out of cinemas and onto Disney Plus.
You’ll have to play a guessing game about how long that will be.
Disney’s streaming strategy for its theatrical releases has been all over the map. Encanto spent a month in theaters before streaming. For Marvel‘s Eternals, it was two. West Side Story — the Steven Spielberg reimagining of the musical — hit Disney Plus about three months after it played exclusively in cinemas.
Disney hasn’t confirmed a streaming release date for Thor: Love and Thunder yet, but here are some educated guesses about what to expect.
What’s Thor: Love and Thunder’s streaming release date on Disney Plus?
Disney hasn’t set a streaming release date for Thor: Love and Thunder. But the earliest that it would reasonably start to stream on Disney Plus would be sometime during the week of Aug. 21.
During the height of lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions, Disney Plus introduced what it called Premier Access, which let subscribers stream its theatrical movies the same day they hit cinemas after paying an extra $30 fee on top of their normal subscription cost. But for more than a year, Disney has been giving its live-action theatrical releases long stints of exclusivity in theaters before making streaming an option.
Unfortunately, Disney’s hasn’t settled on a standard length for these theatrical exclusives yet
The good news is that its last Marvel film arrived on Disney Plus quicker than the ones before it. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness became available to stream about 47 days after its wide release in theaters — that’s two weeks quicker than Eternals and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. But with the Doctor Strange film, Disney also moved closer to the norms of other major studios, which have largely gravitated to giving movies a window of theatrical exclusivity lasting about 45 days.
That’s why the week of Aug. 21 is the one to watch: That would mean Disney has Thor: Love and Thunder following that (roughly) 45-day timeline it adopted for Doctor Strange.
Fortunately, unlike some other studios, Disney typically confirms the streaming release date for its films weeks in advance, so you’re at least likely to get some guidance.
