Who is Gorr the God Butcher? What to expect from Christian Bale's Thor: Love and Thunder villain

When Thor: Love and Thunder hits movie theaters this summer, it will be the second film about Marvel's thunder god directed by Taika Waititi, and a direct follow-up to what the character experienced in Avengers: Endgame. But based on the trailers so far, Thor: Love and Thunder also has a pretty direct source text: Writer Jason Aaron's run of Thor comics. That's where the new villain played by Christian Bale comes from.

It was Aaron and artist Russell Dauterman who created the female version of Thor, soon to be portrayed on screen by Natalie Portman (her true identity as Jane Foster was a closely-guarded secret in the comics for a while, but the movie hasn't bothered with any mystery). The primary antagonist of Aaron's Thor saga — which ran over six years, through multiple books, involving multiple talented artists, and culminating in a Marvel-wide crossover event called War of the Realms — was actually Malekith, the dark elf played by Christopher Eccleston in Thor: The Dark World. So he's already been done in the MCU (and in one of its most-maligned entries, no less). Love and Thunder is therefore opting to focus on the villain whose machinations kicked off Aaron's Thor saga: Gorr the God Butcher.

That colorful name helpfully explains a lot about this fearsome foe who was co-created by Aaron and artist Esad Ribić: He kills gods! That's obviously not an easy thing to do, since gods are known for being strong and immortal. But Gorr can kill gods because he has access to an incredibly powerful weapon with an even better name: All-Black the Necrosword. It has its own convoluted comics history that's not worth fully getting into here (it involves a lot of Venom) but suffice to say that it's made of living black energy that can manifest all sorts of abilities and even warp reality around itself. You see a taste of this in the new Love and Thunder trailer, where the confrontations between Gorr and Thor seem to take place in a surreal, black-and-white landscape.

Which gods does Gorr kill? We've already seen the body of one massive divinity known as Falligar the Behemoth, taken straight from a Ribić comic page. Zeus (Russell Crowe) seems full of power, but we might not bet on him surviving the end of the movie. And hey, there are now two Thors, so the universe could probably sustain the loss of one, right?

Why does Gorr kill gods? Well, he's a disillusioned believer who watched his family die of starvation while praying, always believing that their gods would save them. This could understandably turn anyone into an atheist, but the dispirited Gorr also happened to be standing in the right place at the right time, right when the Necrosword fell from the sky. This weapon turned out to be the perfect fit for the god-hating alien, who put it to use across the cosmos. Given what he sees as the gods' indifference towards mortal life, Gorr has decided that the universe would be better off without them entirely. But how many gods can you kill, how much power can you accumulate, before you start to become a god yourself…?

The fact that Aaron's Thor saga spread across multiple comic series (first Thor: God of Thunder with Ribić, then Thor and The Mighty Thor with Dauterman, then The Unworthy Thor with Coipel, on and on…) makes it hard to track on digital comic services like Comixology or Marvel Unlimited. But fortunately, Marvel has recently collected it all in a massive hardcover omnibus and smaller "complete collection" paperbacks. It definitely looks like they'll provide good grounding for Thor: Love and Thunder.

Don't worry too much about spoiling yourself, either: Jane Foster's storyline and Gorr the God Butcher's plotline never really intersected in Aaron's run, so with both of them prominently featured in this film, there's no telling what unexpected combinations will be coming up.

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