Loki
isn’t just the most-watched Marvel premiere on Disney+ so far, it’s also the “most-watched season premiere ever on Disney+ during its opening week,” according to Disney CEO Bob Chapek. That means Loki just beat the Mandalorian, not just WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. We knew going into the show that Loki would be the most anticipated MCU TV show heading to streaming, and the numbers indicate that fans were indeed dying to see what the God of Mischief might be up to next. Episode 1 didn’t disappoint either, with Marvel diving right into the meat of it. The premiere offered us the fantastic Avengers: Endgame connection we wanted along with several explanations of how the Sacred Timeline works.
The show is just getting started and its star just teased which Loki episodes we should anticipate most. Tom Hiddleston told fans that the fourth and fifth installments are the most exciting ones, even though each separate episode has its own stories to tell. He teased that he could not name all the cast members in the series, suggesting that he was careful not to spoil any of the upcoming secret cameos. And we do expect some exciting cameos in Loki given what head writer Michael Waldron said recently, coupled with other Marvel rumors.
But the film’s craziest cameos might have leaked from an unexpected source, and we have no idea what to make of them. If this leak is accurate, the cameos would be amazing additions to this Marvel adventure. Before explaining everything, I’ll point out that significant spoilers might follow below, assuming the information is accurate.
Let’s start with Hiddleston’s remark from TikTok over the weekend, when the actor praised the cast and crew of the series, making a point of the fact that he wasn’t able to name all the cast members. Here’s that quote again:
It’s a tough one. The [episodes are] all so different, which I love about it. And every episode is almost a self-contained story, partly to do with the brilliance of everybody involved – not me, but Owen Wilson, [director] Kate Herron and cast members I’m afraid I cannot yet name for you, but wait and see.
I think episode 4 and 5, the two of them together, the whole series takes off in a direction that I certainly didn’t see coming when I read it, and I’m really excited for the audience to see it. That’s where we just expand into new territory.
A few days earlier, Waldron and Herron revealed that Marvel allowed them to get as weird as they wanted with the story, including cameos. Waldron teased fans to “expect the unexpected” when it comes to cameos, saying that they could have used anybody they wanted:
If they were within the rights, and legal could clear it, there was no reason we couldn’t try and chase them down.
Finally, an older leak said that mega-villain Kang The Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) will appear in Loki before Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania premieres in 2023.
This brings us to the newest leak that comes from Google Search. A reader notified us that searching Google for “Loki cast” returns the following results, which include three characters that we would not have expected:
Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), and Jasper Sitwell (Maximiliano Hernández) will all make appearances in Loki if this listing is to be believed. There’s no mention of Kang, however.
Google could be wrong about the whole thing. The Search algorithms might have concluded that the three characters are in the TV show based on data listed online in unofficial places that are unaffiliated with Marvel. But if that were to be the case, why is Kang absent?
Of all the three characters, Hulk and Valkyrie have notable histories with Loki. Sitwell’s involvement is the most peculiar one. It certainly falls under the “expecting the unexpected” category. We last saw Sitwell in Endgame in that iconic remake of the elevator scene from Winter Soldier. But he’s actually dead in the MCU following the events of Winter Soldier. Then again, anything can happen when time travel is involved.
I’ll also point out that we saw the Hulk in episode 1’s opening, where he appeared in a recut version of the 2012 Time Heist in New York from Endgame. Of course, all the other Avengers were in the scene as well, but we don’t expect these cameos to count. If they did, Google would have listed them. Not to mention the fact that neither Valkyrie nor Sitwell appeared in that scene.
Time will tell whether Google’s Search algorithms were right about Loki. We already saw a miss for WandaVision, as the show had no Ultron (James Spader) cameo. We’ll also need to wait for the Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness premiere to see whether or not Google Search was correct about the film’s cameos.
Loki episode 2 debuts on Disney+ early Wednesday morning.
Hat tip J.W.
