When it was announced that the fourth Thor movie would feature a villain played by Christian Bale, the general consensus seems to be that Bale would either be playing Gorr the God-Killer or Dario Agger, the businessman/Minotaur. In the end, it did turn out to be Gorr, but giving Bale a chance to play Agger probably would have worked just as well.
Then again, most people didn’t like Thor: Love and Thunder, so maybe it’s for the best that he didn’t.
Dario Agger first appeared in Thor: God of Thunder #19 in April of 2014. Created by writer Jason Aaron and artist Esad Ribic, Dario was the then-new Greek CEO of Roxxon Energy Corporation, one of those shifty corporations in Marvel Comics that usually give trouble to characters like Iron Man. Thor isn’t really equipped to take on corporate evil. However, it turned out that the human-seeming Agger was a bit more when, during a first confrontation with the Thunder God, Agger transformed into a Minotaur, complete with the sort of superhuman strength and durability one might expect from such a being.
See, now he was something of a match for Thor.
That said, Agger is not often a physical threat to whatever hero he’s messing with. He’s more of a general representative of corporate greed. He just so happens to be the sort of crooked CEO that can smack a god around if he has to. As Aaron’s own Thor epic continued, Agger would align himself with Malekith the Dark Elf in order to continue pumping oil from the various Nine Realms that Malekith conquered, all while lending Malekith the sort of tech that only a Midgard-based Marvel corporation could provide, giving Malekith another advantage in the War of the Realms.
That said, as much as Aaron did some good stuff with Agger, I might be inclined to think writer Al Ewing has done better work with the character, first in the pages of The Immortal Hulk and currently in the pages of The Immortal Thor. This Agger still runs Roxxon, though he doesn’t seem to revert to human form anymore, and Roxxon seems to be much bigger. The Immortal Hulk started to push for, among other things, the end of capitalism, and Roxxon really took offense to that. This Roxxon, however, was no longer just an energy company having branched out to include its own social media site and a Fox News-style news network.
Agger would come to regret taking on the Hulk, and not for the reason that one might see, because he recruited the “original Hulk,” a white-haired thing called Xemnu who could alter history to make himself the hero of the world, but he was also doing things to regular people by essentially mutilating their bodies into something closer to his own, and Agger was not immune to such an attack when Xemnu shoved him into his magic box machine, leaving him a bloody pulp. Agger, due to his nature, did manage to survive, only now he’s essentially a Minotaur whose face has no real flesh left on it.
Currently, Agger has used Roxxon to buy the Marvel Universe version of Marvel Comics to use the comics there to manipulate Thor into something a lot less effective, thanks in part to the fact Thor is a god powered by belief and a solid assist from the Enchantress. Will Thor ever be able to just smack this guy upside the head with an enchanted hammer? Well, probably, but for now, he’s that most nasty of nasties: a character that may not be that far off from real world evils.
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