With the release of Thor: Love and Thunder so close, many MCU fans are puzzled that there has not even been a trailer so far. With a July 8th release date rounding the corner, Marvel seldom keeps its upcoming releases under wraps like this unless there’s an angle to play. Moon Knight might be that angle. While it straightforwardly makes sense for Disney to ease back on the marketing for one movie while it has other projects that need exposure, a new fan theory posits that Moon Knight may be building up toward Thor: Love and Thunder‘s main villain.
After nearly a decade and a half of the MCU paying off the interconnections between its properties, fans prove keen-eyed and discerning when it comes to spotting any kind of buildup to future projects they can find. Typically, the shape of those projects becomes clearer the closer their release comes, but for Thor: Love and Thunder, the lack of a trailer or most of the typical promotional material only three months out from its release are curious. The only time the MCU plays its secrets so close to the chest is when there is something to hide, and one Reddit theory from user punitr1983 may have figured out the reason for the secrecy.
The theory draws a connection between the villain in the upcoming film, Gorr the God Butcher, and the Egyptian pantheon currently being explored in Disney+’s Moon Knight series. Though Thor and Moon Knight seldom have much to do with one another in the comics, they do share mystical origins tied in with real-life deities existing within the Marvel universe. For Moon Knight, that means he serves the moon god Khonshu, who often proves at odds with the other Egyptian gods. And slaying his way through gods is exactly how Gorr earned his title.
The theory proposes that the reason fans have seen so little of Thor: Love and Thunder thus far is that Marvel is concealing Gorr for the finale or post-credits of Moon Knight, where it will be revealed the God Butcher has been or will be slicing his way through Khonshu’s companions. There certainly does seem to be animosity between Khonshu and his fellow gods in the Disney+ series, with Ammit taking the fore as an antagonistic force, but Gorr is not exactly known in the comics for discerning between which gods are and are not worthy of surviving his wrath.
Before Thor: Love and Thunder arrives in theaters, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will be hitting the silver screen first. That film is not expected to go without its own connections to the larger mythos of the Marvel multiverse, as its title well implies. Seeing Strange face off against godly and omnipotent forces from other dimensions, the trio of Moon Knight, Doctor Strange, and Thor could very well build up Gorr as the next major overarching threat in the MCU, the likes of which have not been seen since Thanos.
Of course, in drawing such connections, it can be easy to get carried away with just how ambitious any such theory can be. The relative silence surrounding Thor could be a result of sheer marketing. With Moon Knight ongoing and Doctor Strange hitting theaters in only a month, Marvel could well be reserving its resources for marketing Thor for a time when it won’t be elbowing out its fellow projects. Yet, it is hard to deny just how effective a Gorr reveal at the end of Moon Knight would be at instantly sparking excitement for the upcoming film. What better way to establish just how deadly a threat the villain is than to have the God Butcher live up to his name from the start, and what could be a more foreboding and dark series to introduce him in than Moon Knight?
Thor: Love and Thunder crashes into theaters on July 8.