'Thor: Love And Thunder' Continues Disney’s Trend Of Quietly Changing Movies

As we all know, since it was obviously the top news story everyone’s been talking about for the past 24 hours, yesterday was Disney Plus Day – the annual celebration of how we fork over our hard-earned money to a wealthy corporation just so our kids can watch DuckTales and give us 22 minutes of peace dammit. Part of the day’s content dump was the streaming debut of Thor: Love and Thunder, one of the most enjoyable movies about how life is innately meaningless and no Gods will answer your pleas for help. 

Fans were quick to notice that the Disney+ version of Love and Thunder was a tad different than the theatrical cut. Yup, apparently they changed around the CGI used for that floating child head that speaks to Thor. And it looks … still pretty bad, to be honest.

We’ve talked a lot about Disney+ making changes to movies in the past, but typically those changes were in response to a film’s content; like how they cut out an F-bomb from Adventures in Babysitting or pasted CGI mermaid hair overtop a buttcrack in Splash (no digital locks were added to cover Thor’s posterior in Love and Thunder, incidentally). But now they seem to be adjusting movies for creative reasons too.

And it’s not just Thor, last winter, fans noticed that the Disney+ version of The Muppet Christmas Carol had seemingly digitally erased some of the arm rods from the frame – lest we start thinking that these characters were felt puppets, and not genuine old-timey British folks.

Whether that was a change made directly by the streamer or not, the point is the same; streaming content can be tinkered with at any point, without us knowing. George Lucas got a lot of crap for modifying Star Wars (and all his other movies) but at least he owned up to (at least some of) the changes, packaging them in individual releases. These days, films have the potential to be in a constant state of flux, and it’s up to audiences to spot whether something has changed – which sometimes leads people to see changes where none exist, as was the case with Stranger Things recently. So maybe it’s time to visit your local video store if it still exists.

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Thumbnail: Marvel