Marvel May Be Adopting The Mandalorian’s Volume Tech With Thor: Love and Thunder

Over the last week, paparazzi pictures surfaced on the internet of Natalie Portman and her family arriving in Sydney. Of course, a lot of people have been assuming it’s for Thor: Love and Thunder filming, and while that was just an assumption based on the movie scheduled to film at Fox Studios Sydney; there are some signs that early prep work might be underway in Australia for the fourth Thor movie.

Beyond those paparazzi photos of Natalie, I’ve heard that crew are beginning to assemble in Australia. That doesn’t mean that filming is necessarily starting soon, but it’s close enough that people are beginning to make the trek down under to begin preparation.

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.