Between WandaVision and The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, it’s clear that Marvel’s Disney+ shows aren’t a side-attraction in the MCU – they’re fully fleshed-out stories that take on just as much narrative weight as the main movies, just with longer runtimes, episodic presentation, and the opportunity for underserved characters to have more time to shine. Next up is a franchise fan-favourite – the god of mischief himself, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, whose anomalous ‘Loki Variant’ from Avengers: Endgame is about to get caught up in the gears of time-bureaucracy organisation, the TVA.
With a timeline-hopping plot and an alt-universe Loki at its heart, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Loki will be a largely standalone adventure away from the main events of the MCU. Not so, according to head honcho Kevin Feige. “It’s tremendously important. It perhaps will have more impact on the MCU than any of the shows thus far,” he tells Empire in the new issue. “What everybody thought about WandaVision, and was sort of true, and The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, which was sort of true, is even more sort of true for Loki.”
And just as WandaVision gave us Wanda in full Scarlet Witch garb, and The Falcon And The Winter Soldier gave us Sam Wilson as a fully-fledged Captain America, it seems that Loki might prove similarly transformative for its central character. “You want to see, after six hours or so, characters change and evolve,” hints Feige. “We don’t make these shows to not be radical, right?”
As with both of the previous Marvel shows on Disney+, the Empire Spoiler Special Podcast team will be doing weekly Loki episodes, going in depth on every instalment of the show – subscribe to the pod here, and look out for the discussions dropping every Thursday, starting 10 June.
Read Empire’s full Loki feature in The British New Wave issue, on sale Thursday 10 June and available to order online here. Loki starts streaming on Disney+ from Wednesday 9 June.