Can you really make a movie about the multiverse without the God of Mischief? Once upon a time, maybe, sure — but after the events of Loki Season 2, such a misstep seems impossible, not to mention counterintuitive. The series gave us our greatest understanding of Marvel’s multiverse and all its wacky workings. Though it’s no longer nearly as crucial to the Multiverse Saga as it was when Kang the Conqueror was its endgame villain, it’d be incredibly foolish to ignore Loki. After all, the show’s titular anti-hero (played by Tom Hiddleston) did essentially become the multiverse at the end of the series, sacrificing himself to give Marvel’s myriad timelines some stability. He’s kind of the most important character ever now.
However cool Loki’s ending might have been, it was also a weird choice for a franchise that’s supposed to be barreling towards assured destruction. In Avengers: Doomsday and its follow-up, Secret Wars, the multiverse will be broken and put back together again, so where will that leave Loki?
Hiddleston naturally can’t share much of anything about his upcoming role in Doomsday, which will reunite his character with the Avengers — and, most notably, his brother Thor (Chris Hemsworth) — for the first time in seven years. In a recent interview with The River, however, the actor teased a return that’s worth every bit of the hype.
“Avengers: Doomsday is going to be magnificent and will defy all your expectations,” Hiddleston revealed. “It defied mine when I read the film. I thought, ‘This is going to be extraordinary.’”
Hopefully, Hiddleston’s reaction to the Doomsday script also means that the film will do right by Loki. The God of Mischief has always drawn the short straw, but that’s especially the case where the Avengers are concerned. Granted, he was one of their first and fiercest adversaries, so one could argue he deserved everything he got. But said argument got harder to justify as the MCU matured and Loki just kept losing — a plot thread that Loki addressed right out of the gate. The series did the work to bring the character more depth, more compelling purpose. In a big way, it also brought him peace. That makes his upcoming return in Doomsday a bit nerve-wracking: past Avengers movies had a bad habit of undermining Loki’s development, all to deal emotional blows to Thor. But given Hiddleston’s comments about defying expectations, there’s a sense that Doomsday won’t repeat history in that way.
Loki’s ending in his series was pretty perfect, but nothing stays the same forever in the MCU. Optimistically, though, we could be in for something even bigger and better when Doomsday rolls around: the stakes are already high, but there’s plenty of room for this team-up film to surprise us.
