Chris Hemsworth thinks he has played Thor in eight Marvel movies – or it could be nine – now.

So making a follow-up to the hugely successful Thor: Ragnarok with director Taika Waititi that felt original and distinctive was an Asgardian-scale challenge.

“The first time we worked together kind of felt like, ‘this is the last one, go for it, do what you want’,” Hemsworth said before the Australian premiere of Thor: Love and Thunder on Monday night.

Waititi, sitting beside him in a hotel room with a view across to the Sydney Opera House, said they had nothing to lose making Ragnarok as a wild, high-energy comedy that ended up taking $US854 million ($1.2 billion) five years ago.

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“Every single idea we had, [we] just put it in because ‘who knows if we’ll ever get a chance to do this again’,” he said.

“When they said, ‘Let’s do it again’, it was like, ‘Oh shwooo. Do we have any more ideas?’ What do we do?”

Shot in Sydney earlier in the pandemic, Thor: Love and Thunder has an A-list Hollywood cast that includes Natalie Portman as returning astrophysicist Jane Foster, Christian Bale as villain Gorr the God Butcher, Russell Crowe as Zeus, Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie and cameos from Matt Damon, Chris Pratt, Sam Neill and Melissa McCarthy.

Another high-energy comedy that is also a heartfelt romance, it has Thor going through an existential crisis, which gets worse when ex-girlfriend Jane turns up as a female God of Thunder.