Movies, especially big ones like those made by Marvel Studios, are full of illusions. They’re as often filmed on sound stages as they are on location. But sometimes you end up in the unlikeliest of places, like a parking lot, as happened with a major scene from Thor: Love and Thunder. Beware mild spoilers ahead for the ending of Thor: Love and Thunder.
“There’s one scene that’s one of the most visually beautiful scenes I’ve seen on film, and we shot [it] in real life in a Best Buy parking lot. It’s so wild to be on this size of movie, and we were literally in a parking lot with a blue screen, doing this really dramatic thing,” explained Thor: Love and Thunder star Natalie Portman in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “It looks so stunning on film, but every time I see it, I’m like, ‘That’s a Best Buy parking lot.”
While Portman declined to reveal which scene, director Taika Waititi spilled the beans in an interview with Insider. In one of the film’s final scenes, Thor, Jane, and Gorr end up before a cosmic being known as Eternity, that will grant a wish to the person strong enough to approach it. The three characters and Eternity are surrounded by an endless shallow sea.
“There were probably two scenes there,” Waititi said. “But the main one was we did some additional photography for the end with the scene where there’s the water environment by Eternity. So we built a pool of water, it was only like two feet deep. It was really to get bits of information from characters. Because we’re having all these things happen: Gorr is coming to this place to make a wish? In the edit we were like, ‘We need to explain this.'”
Building a temporary pool for a water scene is pretty common–Paramount Studios literally has an actual parking lot that exists for this express purpose. But usually, we don’t find out that a pivotal scene in a tentpole motion picture was filmed someplace so mundane. While we won’t be getting a director’s cut of Thor: Love and Thunder anytime soon, maybe we’ll get to see a major electronics retailer in the background of a shot in the outtakes.
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