Gods, Satan, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Russell Crowe almost played the Prince of Darkness in Thor: Love and Thunder.
By now you may have heard that Russell Crowe has a cameo in Thor: Love and Thunder as the Greek god Zeus. Now comes word that he almost played a very different sort of deity in that film… or, at any rate, a very different sort of supernatural being.
Over the weekend, concept artist Miles Teves revealed on his Instagram account that he was asked at one point to come up with a design for Russell Crowe as Satan, adding: “The folks at Odd Studio told me to depict him at his current weight due to his character being humorously debauched.” This is one of the images:
This raises a few questions for me.
I mean, okay, I already had a few questions just about the Zeus thing, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been all over the map when it comes to gods and other mythological beings.
When the first Thor came out eleven years ago—at a time when the MCU consisted of nothing more than The Incredible Hulk, two Iron Men, and a not-yet-completed Captain America: The First Avenger—the movie went out of its way to explain that the Norse gods really did belong in a world like the MCU, a world of tech moguls and lab experiments gone awry, because Asgardian “magic” was really just another kind of “science”. The Asgardians were more like interdimensional aliens than, y’know, gods, as such.
Something of that comic-book-y sci-fi has persisted in the MCU even as the MCU has delved deeper into stories about Celestials and other cosmic super-beings. Most notably, Eternals suggested last year that a bunch of aliens landed on Earth thousands of years ago and inspired a bunch of our mythologies: one of these aliens was named Gilgamesh, like the Mesopotamian hero, while others had names that echoed some of the better-known Greek deities (the warrior Thena being Athena, the craftsman Phastos being Hephaestus, etc.). A montage during the film’s end credits hinted that the angels in Judeo-Christian lore might be misremembered aliens, as well.
But lately, things have gotten more complicated. Moon Knight didn’t stick in my brain all that well, but it seemed to me that the Egyptian gods in that series were more or less what you’d expect them to be. Black Panther also suggested that a goddess of some sort played a significant role in Wakanda’s past, though as I recall, it was so long ago you didn’t have to commit yourself to a literal reading of the mythology.
And now Thor: Love and Thunder has indicated that at least some of the Greek gods were not misremembered aliens. Greek mythology, in the MCU, would now appear to be a cultural-memory blend of the Eternals and whatever Zeus and his people are.
And where do the Judeo-Christian religions figure into this? As noted, the end credits in Eternals hinted that our angels, at least, were inspired by those aliens. But the angels are not gods, per se, so this wasn’t too edgy a suggestion. It wasn’t like the movie was making any sort of claim about the Trinity or anything like that.
So what would it have meant if Satan had shown up in Thor: Love and Thunder? Satan isn’t a god either—in Christian thought, he’s just a fallen angel. (The most powerful of the fallen angels, sure, and something to be feared as far as that goes—but he’s a created being like the rest of us.) In the popular imagination, it could be argued that Satan basically exists on his own now, quite divorced from any larger mythological context. But if we’re talking about a movie populated by ancient deities, then any depiction of Satan—particularly one that makes him a supernatural being like Zeus rather than, I dunno, an extra-terrestrial victim of human prejudice—is bound to make you wonder where his opposite number fits into this universe’s cosmology. It’s bound to make you wonder how God or maybe even Jesus fits into all this.
Thankfully, I don’t expect Marvel to actually address that question.
For one thing, it would probably be more trouble than it was worth. It’s one thing to kid around with pagan deities that no one really worships any more (well, almost no one). But playing with belief systems that a wide swath of your audience actually subscribes to would be something else entirely (especially if Marvel is now planning to bring the famously and seriously Catholic Daredevil back into the fold).
Still, I can’t help asking.
And now I wait for someone to tell me that Jesus was actually somewhere deep in the background in one of those wide shots in Omnipotence City…
Incidentally, Miles Teves has a long list of credits going back to the mid-1980s, and the IMDb says he has worked on films like Ridley Scott’s Legend (as a concept illustrator), Bless the Child (as an art director), Exorcist: The Beginning (as a sculptor), and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (as a storyboard artist)—all of which had demonic or Satanic imagery. I don’t know how involved he was in that particular aspect of those films, but it’s an interesting connection, all the same.