Thor: The Dark World is often considered one of the worst films in the series, but at least it hasn’t been retconned on the timeline like many of its predecessors have. This is part 8 of a 20 part video series discussing when each film in the MCU takes place. So when does this movie occur?

“Here?” “I’m Loki, you may have heard of…” “That was for New York!”

Now this film does a really great job of letting us know that it occurs in 2013, with a number of items dating the year appropriately. The best example of this is when Darcy bails out Erik Selvig after his crazy stunt at Stonehenge. His release papers state that his offense date was November 14th 2013, so his release likely occurred on the 16th, with the Convergence of the 9 realms taking place on the next day.

We learn that the Convergence of the 9 realms happens “every 5000 years”. Since no specific dates are given, we can assume that the last Convergence was in 2987 B.C. We also get this clip early on of Loki being brought before Odin, and this probably took place just after the Battle of NY (as we discussed in part 6) in 2012. This film also doubles down on a potential mistake that was made in The Avengers in regards to Thor’s placement on the timeline. Avengers would have us assume that it, along with Iron Man 2 and The Incredible Hulk, take place in 2011.

In this scene in Thor: The Dark World, we have Darcy claiming that Thor’s been away for 2 years. That means Thor definitely took place in 2011. So 3% of the runtime of Thor: The Dark World took place in 2987 B.C., 2.2% in 2012, and 94.8% in 2013.