'Thor: Love And Thunder' - The Weird Way Gorr Is Related To Venom

In Thor: Love and Thunder, Christian Bale plays his second most monstrous and disturbing supervillain ever after Dick Cheney: Gorr the Butcher of Gods, a freaky guy who travels the universe killing gods and NOT, as you might have guessed from his name, someone who sells meat to Thor and his pals. A big part of what makes him freaky is his ability to conjure shadow monsters with big, pointy teeth through that god-killing sword he lugs around.  

What the movie doesn't tell you is that those shadow creatures are actually related to another sharp-teethed Marvel character who can't be mentioned in the MCU without an army of lawyers from another studio signing off on it first: Venom.  

See, in the movie (mild spoilers ahoy) Gorr finds the god-slaying sword by the remains of its previous owner and we never learn anything about it other than, well, it slays gods. But in the comics, we learn its full origin: it was created by Knull, an eldritch god who's quite literally older than dirt -- or anything else. Way back before the creation of the universe, Knull was enjoying chilling in the dark void of non-existence when some gods rudely barged in and invaded his turf with this annoying thing called "life."  

Knull resented the intrusion so much that he forged a sword out of the primordial darkness and used it to murder as many gods as possible. Knull was pretty attached to his sword, both physically and emotionally, calling it his "first born" and giving it the badass name of All-Black the Necrosword.  

Unfortunately, while in the process of killing his 43,234th god or so, Knull crash landed in some backwater planet and had his sword stolen by one the natives: some poor sap named Gorr. Knull's beloved All-Black turned out to be a bit of a floozy, since it immediately bonded with Gorr and turned him into a serial killer of magical deities in order to satisfy its addiction to god blood. As for Knull, he eventually figured out how to merge his "living abyss" with living beings to control them. Hence the symbiotes from Venom, which are weak to fire and loud sounds because the dark stuff is still traumatized by the intense forging of All-Black, the granddaddy of all symbiotes. 

It's easy to see why Love and Thunder didn't acknowledge the connection: if they specified that Gorr's sword is a symbiote then that would mean it's technically a Spider-Man character and they'd probably have to pay Sony a cut of the movie merch. Still, nothing in the movie contradicts the idea of All-Black being a sort of proto-Venom -- we're even told that it corrupts its host, which is probably the most famous feature of the symbiotes thanks to the Spider-Man movies and cartoons. We're looking forward to seeing the deleted scene where Christian Bale recreates the exact dance moves below: 

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com. 

Thumbnail: Marvel Studios, Sony Pictures