Loki Trailer Hints At Multiple Loki Variants In The MCU
The second Loki trailer teases the existence of multiple Loki “variants” in the MCU, possibly foreshadowing more than one version of the character in the show. The series will be the MCU’s third Disney+ original, following WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Loki is scheduled to premiere on June 11, one month before the long-awaited release of Black Widow in theaters and on Disney+.
Loki picks up from a parallel timeline glimpsed in Avengers: Endgame, following the version of Loki who escaped with the Tesseract after his original attack on New York City. That escape only became possible because of the Endgame time heist, subsequently splitting Loki off from his original story where he eventually died at the hands of Thanos. Asgard’s trickster god became more of a hero over the course of Phases 2 and 3 – even dying in a noble sacrifice – but this earlier iteration of Loki is still fresh off his original villainous bid for world domination.
That complicated timeline begs the question: Exactly what version of Loki are fans going to see in the new show? According to a tease in the trailer, the answer may be several. In the Loki series, Loki is captured by the Time Variance Authority (TVA) for dangerously altering the timestream via his use of the Tesseract. Owen Wilson’s Mobius M. Mobius, an agent of the TVA, then enlists Loki to help fix those same temporal dilemmas. At one point in the trailer, a colleague of Mobius asks him if he trusts “this Loki variant,” suggesting there could be more than one in play.
Because Loki is all about time travel, it’s possible the line is simply a reference to how multiple versions of a person exist in multiple realities. But, given how intentionally bizarre the show’s story looks, it wouldn’t be out of the question to have Tom Hiddleston come face-to-face with himself at some point. Considering how different Loki was in the first Avengers film compared to how he became later in the story, there could be some interesting moments of the trickster having to confront himself.
Or maybe Loki will create an army of Lokis to conquer the multiverse. The series’ absurdist stylings mean nearly anything seems possible, which is an exciting proposition. MCU Phase 4 has done a great job so far of putting previously minor characters in the spotlight, like Scarlet Witch, Vision, Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes. Hiddleston’s Loki has always been one of the franchise’s most popular characters, and it should be exciting to see him return in full force in Loki – no matter how many of him there end up being.