Earlier this month, Moon Knight head writer Jeremy Slater revealed that we almost got cameos from “three or four” of the Eternals in Marvel Studios’ most recent Disney+ show, and it seems that wasn’t the only crossover on the cards during development as plans were also afoot for the series to tie in to the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder.
“When we started working on the show, we didn’t know when we were debuting,” explained Slater in an interview with The Direct. “We always sort of assumed it would be later down the road, and we would sort of be coming out in fall of 2022, and we thought we would probably be following Thor: Love and Thunder. But at that time, Thor didn’t necessarily have a concrete release date either, everything was sort of up in the air, and it’s like we might be ahead of Thor, or we might be finishing up. So there were different versions of the script where the Gods would sort of talk about, ‘This thing with Gorr the God Butcher [Christian Bale] just happened, and now we’ve got this new problem.’ And then there were other versions of the script where they sort of talked about, ‘We’re hearing rumors [that] Gods are dying, this is not the right time to get involved.’ Like we tried to have our cake and eat it too.”
“We knew the general beats of what would happen in Thor: Love and Thunder, so that we wouldn’t be contradicting anything. But we had versions of the story that sort of teased Gorr’s arrival, and [ones] that were sort of taking place in the aftermath of that movie. Ultimately at some point, Marvel just made the creative decision, ‘You know what, we don’t necessarily need this…’ I think Marvel is getting very smart about how they sort of work in those references and cameos, and they’ll do it if it makes sense. [They won’t] do it if they hurt the story, they don’t do it just for the sake of doing it. I think that was a time where they felt like, ‘We’re stretching to make this connection, we don’t really need it.’”
SEE ALSO: Gorr the God Butcher: An introduction to Christian Bale’s Thor: Love and Thunder villain
A Gorr the God Butcher reference would certainly have been a nice Easter egg for fans leading up to Thor: Love and Thunder, and hopefully as all the uncertainty around production delays and release date shifts continues to settle it’ll be a lot easier for Marvel to factor in these kind of tie-ins as we continue through Phase Four and beyond.
Moon Knight follows Steven Grant, a mild-mannered gift-shop employee who becomes plagued with blackouts and memories of another life. Steven discovers he has dissociative identity disorder and shares a body with mercenary Marc Spector. As Steven/Marc’s enemies converge upon them, they must navigate their complex identities while thrust into a deadly mystery among the powerful gods of Egypt.
Featuring in the cast of Moon Knight are Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke, May Calamawy, May Calamawy, Karim El Hakim, F. Murray Abraham, Ann Akinjirin, David Ganly, Khalid Abdalla, Gaspard Ulliel, Antonia Salib, Fernanda Andrade, Rey Lucas, Sofia Danu, and Saba Mubarak.
Moon Knight is available to stream now on Disney+ while Thor: Love and Thunder releases on July 8th.
