Sooner or later, Beta Ray Bill is going to appear on screen in the MCU. The perennial fan-favourite has long been rumored to show up, though the closest we’ve gotten to date is him appearing as a statue on the Grandmaster’s tower in Thor: Ragnarok. But now we have confirmation that Avengers: Endgame also featured a subtle reference to the character that we all missed, and that’s because it’s only in the recently released script.
Redditor Masterhaze710 spotted the Easter Egg and brought it to everyone’s attention. The reference comes during the time-heist sequence when we see the 2014 ‘Bad’ Nebula wreaking havoc. In the movie, the planet she’s on goes unnamed. In the script, however, it’s referred to as the “Korbinite home world.” This means that Nebula is currently fighting on Beta Ray Bill’s home planet, though we don’t actually see him in the movie.
All this means that Beta Ray Bill is clearly on the minds of the creative team at Marvel Studios, too. We know he exists within the MCU, so he’s all but certain to show up at some point. In fact, in an interview that took place after Avengers: Infinity War, Joe Russo was asked why the character still hadn’t appeared and said:
“Beta Ray Bill has been discussed many times. He was one of my favorite characters as a kid, but it’s just, really, functionally, where does he fit? We’ve got a lot of characters that you care about that we’re trying to tell the stories about, a long arcing narrative about, and when new characters come into the world they have to have an effect on the story otherwise there’s no value in introducing them and we just didn’t have the space in a film like this to do that.”
That all makes sense. Even so, Beta Ray Bill fans will be hoping he at least appears in Thor: Love and Thunder. That film will show Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster wielding Mjolnir, but perhaps she might have a bit of competition from a certain loveable horse-faced alien?