One of the best things about Moon Knight is that it existed almost completely independently of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to the extent that you don’t have to be up to date on the franchise’s extensive mythology to get the most out of the six-episode Disney Plus series.
That being said, now that the first of what fans are hoping could be many seasons is out of the way, the key creatives behind the project have been revealing plenty of abandoned connective tissue. It wasn’t so long ago that the Eternals were revealed to have almost made the cut, and now lead writer Jeremy Slater has revealed to The Direct that ties to Thor: Love and Thunder were very nearly included.
“Both a lot and a little. But the reality is that we had no idea—when we started working on the show, we didn’t know when we were debuting. 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. 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 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.”
It sounds as though the relentless release date reshuffling nixed any name-drops for Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher, but it’s not as if it affected the quality of Moon Knight in the slightest.