Yes, Werewolf by Night is MCU canon — weird, weird canon
Marvel Studios’ oddball Halloween horror special Werewolf by Night opens on a stylized art fresco of the Avengers. A voice-over explains that we’re all familiar with certain events in the world of light, but no one ever talks about the world below, where Werewolf’s story takes place. Then it goes on to tell a story about monsters, creatures never seen before in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
That fresco is a mighty elliptical way of addressing whether Werewolf by Night’s story takes place within established MCU canon — especially since visually and narratively, it looks nothing like the rest of the MCU. Mostly shot in black and white, with heavily stylized performances and goofy violence straight out of a Hammer horror classic, the hourlong Disney Plus mini-movie feels like it takes place entirely in its own world. And the MCU has spent the last few years establishing the existence of the multiverse, and different worlds where anything might happen.
So Polygon asked director Michael Giacchino to clarify: Does Werewolf by Night take place on Earth-616, in the familiar MCU timeline?
The definitive answer, he says, is yes.
“Oh, we tried for a long time to just say [in the intro], Look, this is part of the MCU,” Giacchino says. “But it felt like we also needed to show it as well. And I said, ‘Well, what if we just showed it in the same illustrative way that we’re showing these other images up front?’”
Like other recent MCU stories — Eternals, for instance — Werewolf by Night introduces new ideas to the MCU, like the key MacGuffin, a magical item called the Bloodstone. There are also new characters, including Elsa Bloodstone, heir to the Bloodstone family, played by The Nevers’ Laura Donnelly, and Jack, a contender for the
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