Disney+ and Marvel finally unveiled a first look at its upcoming MCU series Loki during the Disney investors meeting presentation, releasing a trailer that shows Tom Hiddleston back in action as the fan-favorite character. Loki, god of mischief and brother of Thor, was last seen in the MCU in Avengers: Infinity War, when Thanos (Josh Brolin) killed him at the very beginning of the film.
The new Disney+ series is officially part of Marvel’s Phase Four, and is one of the first MCU shows coming to the streaming service, along with WandaVision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier. As is the case with everything Marvel-related, many details surrounding the new series have been kept under wraps, but here’s what we know so far.
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It’s scheduled to debut in May 2021. Loki is the third Disney+ series set within the overarching MCU. It follows WandaVision (January 2021) and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (March 2021), and will be followed by Hawkeye in late 2021. The series’ release was delayed after production shut down due to the coronavirus outbreak. The new premiere date was announced during a Disney presentation to investors in December 2020.
We have the first trailer. Feige revealed the first full trailer (seen above) for Loki during a Disney’s investors meeting in December 2020. The trailer kicks off with the Avengers: Endgame scene in which Loki uses the Tesseract to escape his captors during the Avengers’ time heist. He winds up passed out in the middle of a desert, where he wakes up to encounter three strangers. The trailer also offers a first look at Owen Wilson’s character, who tells Loki, “Time passes differently here in the TVA” — a reference to Marvel Comics’ Time Variance Authority, a group that monitors all the timelines in the multiverse and eliminates the most dangers ones. The trailer also shows various versions of the character, including one wearing a campaign button with his own name on it.
The trailer came 10 months after Marvel released a Super Bowl teaser, in which Loki, seemingly in an interrogation room, promises to “burn this place to the ground.”
It’s Marvel’s first crime thriller. During the Disney’s presentation to investors in December 2020, Marvel boss Kevin Feige said, “As with our other shows coming to Disney+, we wanted to try something a little different, explore a new genre for us at Marvel studios. So we’ve put Loki at the center of his own crime thriller.”
It’s a prequel… sort of. Before Avengers: Endgame, all we knew was that the limited series was going to follow Loki as he popped up throughout history and influenced historical events. In the wake of Endgame, the show is going to follow his journey after he steals the Tesseract and disappeared with the Space Stone in 2012.
Which means this will not be the evolved Loki of Thor: Ragnarok. As the god of mischief, Loki has betrayed Thor (Chris Hemsworth) numerous times throughout their lives, so it wasn’t overly surprising when he did it again halfway through the events of 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok. But by the end of the critically acclaimed film, in which Thor revealed he thought the world of his brother, Loki evolved and returned to help Thor, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), and Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) fight to save Asgard from Hela (Cate Blanchett).
The Loki featured in the limited series, however, is the Loki of 2012’s The Avengers. As Hiddleston said at San Diego Comic-Con last summer, “He’s still that guy [from Avengers], and just about the last thing that happened to him was he got Hulk-smashed, so there’s a lot of psychological evolution that has still yet to happen.”
“It is one of the most exciting, creative opportunities I have ever come across,” he continued. “It is a new challenge, and I cannot wait to get started.”
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It will tie into the Doctor Strange sequel. We already knew WandaVision was going to tie directly into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but now Marvel’s Kevin Feige has confirmed Loki will also be connected to the film, which is scheduled to be released in theaters May, 7, 2021.
It will be helmed by Rick & Morty’s Michael Waldron. Waldron has been tapped to not only serve as showrunner, but also write the pilot and executive-produce the series. Kate Herron serves as director.
The cast includes some major talent. Among the stars joining Loki on this ride are Owen Wilson and Richard E. Grant, who were cast in major roles, as well as Sophia Di Martino, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Wunmi Mosaku. Details abou ttheir roles are being kept under wraps.
It is six episodes. That’s not very many, but it’s more than we thought we’d get after Loki died.
