MCUCosmic.com are reporting that early prep work for Thor: Love and Thunder is taking place at Fox Studios Sydney, with some of the crew assembling having previously worked with the StageCraft technology used on The Mandalorian, suggesting it may be user here too.
The interesting thing is, it sounds like there are some with experience with The Mandalorian’s Volume technology making the long trip down to Australia. With the Star Wars Disney+ productions set in Los Angeles at the Manhattan Beach stages The Mandalorian used and the “train yard” outdoor set, it’s likely they’re headed there for Thor: Love and Thunder (as Shang-Chi is in its latter part of filming already). Thor is the next big Disney production to film there.
The Volume is a virtual set technology that The Mandalorian used to create outdoor environments convincingly on an indoor set. There are scenes in the series shot in the Volume that you would swear were on location, that’s how convincing the VFX work in the Volume is. Disney likes to share technology across productions, especially something like the Volume that can reduce the need for location filming in a COVID world, which means it wouldn’t be surprising to see Marvel Studios quickly adopt it.
This would be good news for Thor: Love and Thunder as they would be able to do virtually all of their filming on the sound stages while still recreating location environments via the Volume. It also wouldn’t be surprising if other Marvel Studios productions begin to use it as well, it’s a technology Disney has access too and has been proven very effective with The Mandalorian and soon Obi-Wan.
Thor: Love and Thunder, featuring Chris Hemsworth and Star Wars alumni Natalie Portman, is scheduled to be released in 2022.
