At the very least, Thor: Love and Thunder will include a tease of Death, Avengers: Infinity War’s biggest missing character. In adapting Thanos to the big screen, Infinity War rewrote several major elements of the Mad Titan’s story. As a result, a few important characters were excluded from the film.
Death is one of several cosmic figures who have the potential to make an official live-action debut in MCU Phase 4. The subject matter of Thor: Love and Thunder puts a long list of extremely powerful characters on the table for the MCU. In the upcoming movie, Thor and his allies will be up against Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher, who will set his sights on the gods themselves. His hunt will allow Marvel to explore new corners of the MCU and gods from pantheons outside Norse mythology. Among those confirmed to appear are Zeus and the Greek gods. Other cosmic entities powerful enough to be regarded as deities could end up on his radar as well.
The second Thor: Love and Thunder trailer featured a shot of five statues, with each one representing a Marvel Comics character that could be counted as a god in the MCU. One of them is Mistress Death, one of the most powerful cosmic entities in the Marvel Universe. She was also the character who motivated Thanos’ plan in the Infinity Gauntlet comic, thus making her even more integral to the story than its hero, Adam Warlock. In the original story, Thanos had an obsession with death that he took to a new level when he developed romantic feelings for the living embodiment of death. However, she paid him no heed. Getting her attention was his main goal when he gathered the Infinity Stones and killed half of everyone in the universe. He thought such an act would earn her respect., but instead she joined forces with his enemies.
Since Marvel completely changed Thanos’ motivations for using the Infinity Gauntlet, it made sense that in spite of her importance to the comic book version of the story, Death wasn’t involved in Avengers: Infinity War. She was seemingly alluded to in The Avengers’ post-credits scene when The Other said that fighting Thanos is “to court death”, but that Marvel Comics Easter egg was the extent of her connection to the villain in the MCU. That being said, the decision to cut Death out of Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet adaptation hasn’t rendered her character useless.
Similar to how Marvel is finding room for both Adam Warlock and Pip the Troll in the aftermath of Thanos’ defeat, the MCU can still use Death even if it can’t use her most memorable story. She may not get anything more than a statue in Thor: Love and Thunder, but the more the MCU continues to explore the supernatural and cosmic side of its world, the chances of her appearing in some capacity are sure to grow.
