Who says you have to take something seriously in order for it to be good, sometimes it's nice to just have fun.
You could have fun with it being more serious. Winter Soldier for instance. A vastly more enjoyable and fun movie because it was more serious. It felt like a actual threat.
Also it feels like its something that could actually happen. Like if SHIELD and superheroes were real, Winter Soldier's story could actually happen. There are no universes in which Thor 3 would happen.
I think you might have backed yourself into a corner. You're talking about a comic book character. They don't all have to be dark and have lines like " It was providence!" and lean hard on the religious undertones. If you're looking for a serious comic book movie you might have to look somewhere else.
I think there is a middle ground. I’ve read a few Thor comics over the years and I wouldn’t say they were dark, but I wouldn’t call them lighthearted as well.
I'm not really sure I'd call movies like The Winter Soldier fun. It's a great movie, and there is some humor, but not really enough for me to call it fun. Whether or not something could actually happen is the absolute lowest thing on my list of expectations when I'm going to see sci-fi fantasy movie about Norse gods and a giant green rage monster, on an alien planet controlled by Jeff Goldblum at a rave.
That's the point. There is no enjoyment in movies like that. There are no rules so shit just happens. It's cheap. Cheapest form of entertainment by far.
Not true at all, those kind movies still have their own set of rules they follow, it's just that the rules are different from the ones in our world.
Yep--the greatest Thor stories (in his own comic) from the Silver & Bronze Age of Thor (the Lee/Kirby - Lee/Conway/Buscema periods) were so much a series of grand, often dark stories that had weight, spoke its own language, and had little interaction with other Marvel characters. The first Thor movie held that promise, but was utterly blasted away from every appearance going forward, where he was just as Stark mockingly referred to him--"Point Break"--a dim, hammer-swinging faux surfer. Not at all. Thor in his first movie still had a character that was distant from humans--his manner and perceptions were alien to human, as it should be. His entire realm felt like it was its own universe, until the PTB had to go in the direction of never taking much seriously for more than ten minutes at a time. Same concerns. Yep. If a character has been reduced to a self-effacing dope and is the butt of jokes when he's supposed to be a commanding hero (with some emotional flaws), then he's simply not going to be extended comic relief. That's not the essence of the character at his best. Bad example. That was one episode--but I'll toss in "A Piece of the Action" and "I, Mudd" as well, but three episodes out of 79 did not color the perception of TOS as some joke-fest. It was seen as the sci-fi drama it was meant to be. Contrast that to most of Thor's appearances, which are now borderline satirical than what the character is suppose to be.
The movie's runtime is one hour, 59 minutes. The shortest MCU movie since Ant-Man and the Wasp. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/thor-love-thunder-runtime-revealed-065229636.html