Thor: Ragnarok is clearly going to be a big movie when it comes to setting up the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers 4 but the threequel's director and producers have now shed some light on how exactly it fits into the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's also been confirmed that the movie takes place at the same time as Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming!
"What [Thor] realizes really fast is that this one quest, that universe ending peril that he was trying to figure out, branched off into any number of universe ending perils," producer Brad Winderbaum says of what's become of the God of Thunder since setting off at the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron to find out more about the Infinity Stones. As a result, he's become a "lone gunslinger" of sorts.
"We didn’t want to get bogged down in Infinity Stones and da-da-da-da because I don’t even understand that stuff a lot of the time…" Chris Hemsworth laughed when asked if we'll see the Stones here. "[But] I spoke to The Russos before I even had the script for this and said, ‘How does [Thor: Ragnarok] link into [Avengers: Infinity War]? What can we look out for? How do we continue this time?’… Without giving anything away though, [Thor: Ragnarok] definitely bleeds nicely into those."
However, don't go thinking we're not getting any sort of hints and teases about what's to come here as Winderbaum hints that Asgard is being taken out of commission the same way as S.H.I.E.L.D. in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. That's clearly going to have a major impact on Thanos' planned invasion.
"In Phase One, we established this cosmology that involved Asgard, Odin and certain ideas that you thought were eternal and could never change. [Thor: Ragnarok] breaks them down in a very similar way to how Winter Soldier broke down SHIELD." Black Panther also comes before Infinity War but it seems like this movie is definitely going to lay the groundwork for what happens when Thanos attacks!