Loki’s Escape in ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Wasn’t Supposed to Set up the Disney+ Series, Kevin Feige Says
Loki has cheated death more than once in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And there were two instances where his death was supposed to be permanent. But fans wanted more of Tom Hiddleston’s God of Mischief. Now, the Loki viewers saw in Avengers: Infinity War truly is dead, but a past version of him escaped with the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame. As it turns out, Marvel had no intentions of creating the Loki Disney+ series when it wrote that Endgame scene.
What happened to Loki in ‘Infinity War’?
Loki died for good in the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War. To get the Tesseract, save himself, and save Thor, he tried to trick Thanos and kill him. But as the last two Avengers movies showed, Thanos is hard to defeat.
The titan killed Loki in front of Thor for the deception, saying “no resurrections this time.” Fans wondered if this meant Thanos resurrected Hiddleston’s character after he fell from the Bifrost at the end of Thor. He also survived being stabbed in Thor: The Dark World, unbeknownst to his brother. But Thanos didn’t have the means to truly bring people back from the dead at that time. Had he had all five Infinity Stones, that might have been a possibility.
Loki and Thanos worked together in the past, as Thanos helped him stage his attack on New York in The Avengers in exchange for Infinity Stones. As a result, he knew of the god’s knack for staying alive. The “no resurrections” line was likely Marvel’s way of confirming Loki’s death would stick this time. Even Hiddleston thought Infinity War was the end for his character.
“It felt very, very final, and I thought, ‘OK, that’s it. This is Loki’s final bow and a conclusive end to the Odinson saga,'” he told Entertainment Weekly.
Tom Hiddleston’s ‘Endgame’ scene served a different purpose at first
Loki’s death in Thor: The Dark World was supposed to be his conclusive end as well. But it was rewritten because test audiences didn’t want him to die. That led to Loki’s return in Thor: Ragnarok (the last of the Odinson trilogy) and Infinity War.
The time heist made Hiddleston’s Endgame scenes possible. The goal was to get the Tesseract (which housed the Space Stone) in 2012 and get back to the future. But Hulk ran into Tony Stark, knocking the Tesseract case out of his hands. The cube slid over to the handcuffed Loki, who took his opportunity to escape immediately. Marvel president Kevin Feige said he didn’t realize the window of opportunity this scene created for a Loki TV show.
“[That scene] was really more of a wrinkle so that one of the missions that the Avengers went on in Endgame could get screwed up and not go well,” he said. “Which is what required Cap and Tony to go further back in time to the ’70s.”
Where did Loki go with the Space Stone?
Loki’s only purpose in Endgame was to cause one last bit of mischief. But Bob Iger, former CEO of Disney, approached Feige about creating content for Disney+ before Endgame came out. And that’s where the Loki Disney+ series was born.
“I think the notion that we had left this hanging loose end with Loki gave us the in for what a Loki series could be,” Feige said. “So by the time [Endgame] came out, we did know where it was going.”
After Endgame, fans wondered where Loki escaped to with the Space Stone. A trailer for the series revealed he wound up in what looks like Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. But he’ll be arrested by the Time Variance Authority, a bureaucratic agency that isn’t happy with the trickster for messing with time.
The Disney+ series will pick up right where Endgame left off, like WandaVision and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. Loki premieres on Disney+ Wednesday, June 9.
