Warning: This article contains spoilers for Thor: Love and Thunder.

The backstory given to Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder is quite different from his origins in the comics and it's worth doing a comparison of the two. In the transition from the comics to Love and Thunder, Gorr has undergone a variety of changes that manage to keep the core elements of his character intact, with some of the bigger details shifting around him. The changes in Thor: Love and Thunder make for a compelling on-screen villain, even if he differs somewhat from his comic book counterpart.

Gorr the God Butcher is the titular villain of the God Butcher arc of Jason Aaron’s Thor run, many elements of which were adapted into Thor: Love and Thunder. Gorr grew up in a religious culture on a famine- and poverty-stricken planet, but one tragic circumstance after another left Gorr a broken man wishing for death while cursing the gods who never helped him and his loved ones. At his lowest point, Gorr obtained a powerful weapon called the Necrosword and decided to use its power to kill all gods in the universe which, naturally, brought him into conflict with Thor.

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Thor: Love and Thunder maintains the most basic aspects of Gorr’s character, but there are still significant differences between the histories of each version of the character. Love and Thunder isn’t a complete adaptation of the God Butcher arc, with the movie only using certain aspects of it for an otherwise original story. Here are the biggest changes made to Thor: Love and Thunder's villain and why Gorr the God Butcher was changed for the MCU.

How Thor: Love & Thunder Changes Gorr’s Origin

Gorr the God Butcher in Thor Love and Thunder and Comics

The main backstory difference is that the comics do a lot more to build up to Gorr’s vendetta against the gods than Thor: Love and Thunder does. In the comics, Gorr was shown to have gradually lost faith in the gods as he lost his loved ones one after another to predators, starvation, and nature itself, and was even stoned and left for dead by his tribe for renouncing the gods. Thor: Love and Thunder, even for cameos, cuts out all of Gorr’s loved ones except for his daughter, originally his son in the comics. It also makes no mention of him being exiled from his tribe and shows him still retaining his faith even when his daughter dies, only losing it when he meets his god, Rapu, in person and realizes how cruel and indifferent Rapu is.

The final events that make Gorr into the God Butcher and what immediately follows are also significantly different between the comics and the MCU. In the comics, after Gorr was exiled from his tribe, he encountered the dark god Knull and a golden god who crashed onto his planet while in the middle of combat. Badly wounded, the golden god asked Gorr for help with his injuries. Gorr, angered by the perceived hypocrisy of a god asking for his help, used the Necrosword to kill them both (although the dark god Knull, the King in Black, actually survived the encounter). Gorr then spent centuries slaughtering gods across the galaxy, which led to an encounter with a young Thor in the ninth century that almost led to Gorr's death.

In Thor: Love and Thunder, the golden god is replaced with Gorr’s own god, Rapu. Gorr kills him not because he perceives him as a hypocrite, as in the comics, but from a combination of the Necrosword corrupting him and hating how Rapu laughs off the suffering of Gorr’s people. From there, Gorr begins killing gods as a means of eventually drawing Thor’s attention so he can steal Stormbreaker. Thor's mystical ax is necessary for Gorr to summon the Bifrost to meet with the Marvel cosmic entity known as Eternity. In this way, Thor: Love and Thunder's Gorr origin is a stark contrast to the comics, where Gorr engaged in random slaughter until his first encounter with Thor forced him to play smarter.

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Why Gorr Looks So Different In The MCU

Thor Love and Thunder Christian Bale as Gorr Fanmade comic accurate design

There are clear differences between Gorr in the comics and Gorr in the MCU, and the first one that needs to be addressed is why the MCU version looks so radically different from the comic book version. In the comics, Gorr was muscular and had a very alien appearance with a flattened, reptilian nose, large tentacles sprouting from his head, blank white eyes, jagged teeth, and a body clad only in the shapeshifting Necrosword that alternated between a cloak and armor. In Thor: Love and Thunder, however, Gorr is rather svelte and wears normal clothes instead of relying on the Necrosword to cloak himself. What's more, he looks like a normal human outside of his white skin and jagged teeth, both of which only come after he obtains the Necrosword and is transformed by it.

Love and Thunder's Gorr changes from the comics are fairly drastic for specific, smart reasons. In regard to physique, according to Christian Bale, when it was time for him to film Love and Thunder, he had just gotten done with a movie where he needed to be skinny. With the pandemic still in full swing at the time, there wasn’t time for him to bulk up so his design was changed to focus more on his powers than his body. As for his face, according to director Taika Waititi, Gorr’s appearance was changed because he felt that keeping the original design would have drawn too many comparisons to Harry Potter’s Voldemort, and the antennae were likely discarded under the perception that they wouldn’t work with a more human appearance, and perhaps even because they too closely resemble the Twi'lek from Disney's other major IP, Star Wars.

Why Gorr’s Backstory Is So Different In Thor: Love & Thunder

Gorr looking around in Thor Love and Thunder

With Thor: Love and Thunder running for just a little under two hours, there isn't enough time to delve into every aspect of Gorr’s backstory from the comics. It's streamlined into a few powerful scenes that still establish Gorr's rage and motivation while saving time. While Gorr is the main villain of Thor: Love and Thunder, the true focus of the movie is on Thor’s character development and the rekindling of his relationship with Jane. Gorr’s presence serves as a foil for Thor and a cautionary tale. Thor can lose himself in grief and loss, as Gorr has, or he can, as Jane implores him, keep his heart open. Gorr's story is told in shorthand as just enough to set him up as Thor's dark mirror.

It would be easy enough for a comic book reader to be disappointed by the significant changes to Gorr in Thor: Love and Thunder, even if there are good reasons for the changes. But the MCU’s version of Gorr still ends up being a unique character in his own right, even if he may not capture the exact same energy as the original. Thanks to that, Christian Bale's Gorr still has a lot to offer, and is worth appreciating.

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