Werewolf by Night: The Bloodstone’s Powers Explained

The latest, greatest Marvel MacGuffin has arrived. With the arrival of Werewolf by Night, the fabled Bloodstone has officially entered Marvel Cinematic Universe canon. While fans may notice it looks awfully similar to the Infinity Stones Thanos just spent years collecting, a Marvel producer says the item couldn’t be any more different.

Speaking with The Direct, Werewolf by Night producer Brian Gay revealed the Bloodstone carries strictly supernatural qualities in that it allows the bearer to control the monsters of the world.

“One thing is its sort of supernatural powers, right? The Infinity Stones specifically were about the specific style and type of power that they had,” Gay told the outlet. “And for the Bloodstone, we lean into the comic lore and basically, it has a specific ability to control the supernatural creatures.”

He added, “That’s why it’s so important to the monster hunters is because with them, I mean, this is the biggest baddest weapon of all, right? It can take down any number of mermaids or vampires or whatnot. But it’s the only one in existence, which lends it to why it’s so important.”

Why was the Bloodstone changed?

Like the Infinity Stones—or Infinity Gems per the source material—before it, Marvel Studios opted to change to the Bloodstone instead of the comics-accurate Bloodgem. Outside of that single name change, the MacGuffin effectively serves the same exact purpose. It debuted in the Marvel Comics lore alongside Ulysses Bloodstone in 1975, allowing the monster hunter to take on the baddest behemoths in the land.

What is next for the Bloodstone?

The Bloodstone’s MCU future  has yet to be seen. Laura Donnelly—the actor behind Elsa Bloodstone, the current holder of the gem—is excited about her potential future in the Marvel franchise.

“I would love to be able to delve more into her background going forward and I did do all of that, the reading and the research,” Donnelly previously told ComicBook.com “I read Nextwave and I read her one-shot novel and things like that to get an idea of it and then I discussed with Michael [Giacchino], our director, how much of that we were keeping as truth for her character and how much we hadn’t decided on yet and things like that. So yeah, there’s a lot of her background I think that stays true, but not all of it, and we find Elsa in a moment, where she has been away from her family and she has been kind of disengaged from that whole world, that her father brought her up in and now she’s coming back into it for the first time. So for me, that was so much more of an interesting way to be able to see that character for the first time as she’s coming back into a situation, particularly one that makes her very uncomfortable and in which she doesn’t know, in the context, she doesn’t really know who she is or where she belongs anymore. So that for me made it really interesting.”

Werewolf by Night is now streaming on Disney+. What other characters do you think should get a similar special? Let us know your thoughts either in the comments section or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter to chat all things MCU!