Loki Is Officially Getting His Own Disney+ Show, So You Haven't Seen The End Of Him
Marvel's rollout of Phase 4 at San Diego Comic-Con was remarkable, with a lineup of titles that promised Avengers: Endgame was only the beginning of the cultural dominance to come. Like Phase 3, it covered 11 titles, but with two significant differences. For one, Phase 3 rolled out 11 titles over 4 years, whereas Phase 4 will release the first 10 in only two years. And secondly, half of the slate will be TV series on Disney+. The shows include longtime characters Falcon & The Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, and Loki. So when will Loki premiere on Disney+? According to the planned schedule, it won't be for a while yet.
Disney has not yet released an official list of shows and movies that will be available for streaming the day Disney+ rolls out. But CNET did some digging to try to put together a list of what fans could see starting in November, when the service launches. Some of the titles were already confirmed, such as Lucasfilm's The Mandalorian. Some are easy guesses, like Captain Marvel, the first Marvel film to be held back from Netflix. But none of the Phase 4 shows will be ready at launch for the service. The earliest one won't arrive until almost a full year in.
Here's the currently-announced lineup of Disney+ shows:
- The Falcon & The Winter Soldier (Fall 2020)
- WandaVision (Spring 2021)
- Loki (Spring 2021)
- What If…? (Summer 2021)
- Hawkeye (Fall 2021)
Fans have a lot of questions about some of these shows. Some seem sensible, like The Falcon & The Winter Soldier, Captain America's two buddies who have been left behind. What If...? is also easily understood — it's an animated series where Marvel explores alternate timelines. (Hence the title.) WandaVision stars Paul Bettany as Vision, a character who died in Infinity War, but considering Wanda's abilities as the Scarlet Witch, there are ways around this.
But Loki? He died in Infinity War, too. And there's nobody to try to bring him back out of grief.
Except, like What If...?, Loki only died in one version of Infinity War. When Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, and Scott Lang went back to the events of the Battle of New York in 2012, Loki's fate was irrevocably altered.
Rogers and Stark wound up having to jump to a different point in the timeline to get their hands on the Space Stone, since Loki stole it away from 2012. But Loki taking the Tesseract and disappearing didn't happen in the original Avengers. This escape sets up a whole new timeline.
That timeline is what the new series is planning to explore. Having run from his fate, Loki and the Space Stone can bounce around wherever his whimsey takes him, just as long as he doesn't get caught by the other Avengers.
This need to stay away from the other characters will make the show more of a standalone series, rather than tie into the Phase 4 slate of movies. But that just means more Tom Hiddleston as the beloved trickster, something no one will complain about.
Disney+ launches Nov. 12, 2019.
