There is an impressive number of complex metrics that economists, sociologists, psychologists and other “How are people doing?” -oenologists have used over the years to determine the health of a society: life expectancy, GDP, how many people are killed in a global pandemic each year, how close the country is to sliding into authoritarian fascism, etc. But—if we’re being completely honest—many of these metrics have the major drawback of being complete and utter bad. That’s why we here at the AV Club Newswire office have now invented our own measure of the health of a functioning democracy: The Mjolnir Index, aka, “How much money did the most recent Thor movie make at the box office compared to with the other films in the franchise?’ And baby, from that point of view, we’re looking at nothing but up, up, up! The movie in question is, of course, Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love And Thunder , which despite receiving a pretty lackluster critical reception in recent weeks (and despite reports of new variants of COVID running rampant, no, that’s the bad metric, just think of the hammers) , is set to have the best opening weekend of any Thor movie ever. That is, admittedly, scoring on a slight curve: The first two Thors, directed by Kenneth Branagh, weren’t exactly barnstormers when they hit theaters in 2011 and 2013, grossing just $65 million (Thor) and $85 million ( The Dark World) on opening weekends. Waititi’s Ragnarok, generally held up as the best of the films, fared considerably better in 2017, earning $122 million in its opening weekend. But Love And Thunder is expected to surpass even that, per THR: Even by Disney’s most conservative estimates, Waititi’s film will likely bring in at least $135 million this weekend, making it Thor’s best grosser to date, and establishing once and for all that everything is fine, fine, things can’t be bad if hammer man movies are still making so much money. We repeat it to ourselves. We repeat it to ourselves, until the repetition makes it true.
