‘Loki’ Almost Visited the American Revolution and Studio 54 — Here’s Why He Doesn’t in the Marvel Disney+ Series
Avengers: Endgame wasn’t the last word in Marvel time travel. The new Disney+ series Loki features the God of Mischief (Tom Hiddleston) captured by the Time Variance Authority. Loki agrees to help the timekeepers catch another variant, and it involves traveling through time himself. But not, however, to the American Revolution or swinging ’70s according to the show’s writer.
Marvel held a Zoom press conference for Loki on June 7. Loki head writer Michael Waldron and producer Kevin Feige spoke about the show’s time travel. The show premieres June 9 on Disney+.
How did Loki travel through time in Marvel?
In Avengers: Endgame, The Avengers traveled back to the 2012 Battle of New York. Loki was using the Tesseract to summon the Chitauri. The Avengers needed to gather all the Infinity Stones from before Thanos obtained them. However, the Tessaract enabled Loki to evade capture and leap through time. Waldron said the writers brainstormed all the different eras to which he could travel.
“We just filled a white board in the writers room and said where’s the craziest, most expensive places we can try to shoot something at?” Waldron said. “Ultimately [director] Kate [Herron] was the one who had to figure out okay, can we make this look awesome? So it had to run through her.”
‘Loki’ writers ruled out this sort of time travel
The possibilities for Loki throughout history were endless. So, Waldron ruled out some of the options.
“I think everybody maybe expects all right, that’s going to be Loki riding with Paul Revere,” Waldron said. “That’s the lowest hanging fruit version of that. So we wanted to subvert those expectations and go to places that maybe people knew but didn’t know well and would just be exciting to see. So yeah, just a lot of good ideas from the whole team.”
Marvel almost did time travel before ‘Avengers: Endgame’
Feige said the idea of Loki in the past has been around Marvel since the 2011 Thor movie. For a while, Marvel was doing short films, One Shots, that would go on the DVDs of the latest MCU movie. Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) got one and so did Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley). One of those could have been Loki in the past, but Feige is glad they waited until the Disney+ series.
“Early on, we did,” Feige said. “Early on, it was sort of, as Michael calls it, the low hanging fruit. There were ideas Tom will remember for a short film going back almost a decade for Loki in the ‘70s, running a Studio 54 in the ‘70s. I think we had some concept art of him on a horse. Thankfully, thanks to Michael and Kate, this show became infinitely more interesting than that and the time periods are almost secondary to the story itself.”
