After skipping 2020 altogether due to the pandemic, Marvel Studios is already marketing its third TV show of 2021 with the release of the official trailer for Loki on Monday. As the title suggests, the Disney+ series will pick up the story of the titular trickster god following his escape with the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame. Unfortunately, it turns out that by picking up the Tesseract, Loki broke reality, and now the Time Variance Authority (TVA) wants the Asgardian prince to help them put it back together again. And no, he can’t have a weapon.
We got an extended sneak peek at the show late last year when Marvel shared an exclusive clip on YouTube, but the first official trailer gives us a much better idea of how the story will play out and who the main characters will be. TVA senior executive Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) appears to be heading up the operation, but it’s clear that the interdimensional bureaucracy is all hands on deck after Loki pulled his reality-warping stunt.
Tom Hiddleston will obviously be reprising his role as Loki from the MCU, and will be joined by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sophia Di Martino, Wunmi Mosaku, and Richard E. Grant. Michael Waldron (Rick and Morty, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) is the head writer, and Kate Herron (Sex Education) directs.
You can watch the official trailer for Loki below to see what Thor’s brother has been up to since Endgame:
So far, all of Marvel’s Disney+ shows have taken place after the events of Avengers: Endgame. In WandaVision, we got to see Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) come back from the Blip alongside countless others in a scene that basically played out in reverse of the scene in Avengers: Infinity War after Thanos used the Infinity Gauntlet. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has not only explicitly referenced the Blip on multiple occasions, but we’re also seeing the fallout of billions of humans suddenly returning to Earth after five years away.
While these explorations of post-Blip society have been interesting (and weirdly timely), Loki looks to be completely divorced from the real world in a way that WandaVision and Falcon are not. Without a doubt, there will be plenty of references to the larger MCU saga, but Loki is shaping up to be a very different show than its predecessors. Also, the fact that Loki’s head writer Michael Waldron is also writing the next Doctor Strange movie means that he knows exactly how Loki is (or isn’t) going to fit into the rest of Phase 4 as the movies start coming out. At the very least, Loki should build upon some of the hints that WandaVision dropped about the future of the MCU.
Loki begins streaming on Disney+ on June 11th, 2021.
