This week, Marvel Studios finally confirmed their intentions to move forward with Season of Loki after the season finale ended on a Multiverse-shattering cliffhanger. However, not everyone will be returning for that second season as director Kate Herron has informed Deadline that she will not be returning and has seemingly exited the show.
“I’m not returning. I always planned to be just on for this and to be honest, season 2 wasn’t in the — that’s something that just came out and I’m so excited. I’m really happy to watch it as a fan next season, but I just think I’m so proud of what we did here and I’ve given it my all. I’m working on some other stuff yet to be announced,” Herron told Deadline in a recent interview about the end of the Loki series.
The director also said this about current plans to work with Marvel in the immediate future, “No, I’m just focused on my own stuff at the moment. I love Marvel and I’d love to work with them again, but my outing with Loki is what I’ve done with them.”
Kate Herron was a massive reason why Loki was such a fun experience and we’ll gladly follow her with whatever her future projects will be.
On a brighter side, head writer Michael Waldron is reportedly going to be still involved with Season 2 in some capacity and it’s expected the we’ll see a bulk of the cast return as well.
The Ronin caught word a while back that show would be filming something in the United Kingdom, but that didn’t end up happening and suggests that Season 2 might be moving location from Altanta to the London area. This still needs to be confirmed but it looks the United Kingdom might become a hub location for some of the Marvel/Disney+ shows as Secret Invasion is getting ready to shoot there in the very near future.
Long before we even got our hands on the first footage for the Loki series, the project’s LLC (Limbo Productions I LLC) seemingly gave away the studio’s intention to pursue a second season this was supported by trade reports that head writer/series creator Michael Waldron would be involved in Season 2 alongside a Star Wars film that Kevin Feige would be producing for Lucasfilm.
Back in April, The Ronin caught word of something Loki related shooting in London. That seemingly didn’t happen and won’t be happening for some time, potentially next year. It was a possibility that Season 2 would be moving from Atlanta to London. A reason this makes sense is that a bulk of the cast including folks such as lead Tom Hiddleston and Loki’s director Kate Herron are British. After an extended production in Atlanta during the height of the pandemic, you could understand if there were requests to shift filming across the pond for Season 2.
We’re already going to see stuff like the Skrull event Disney+ series Secret Invasion primarily film in London,so, moving Loki there wouldn’t be that shocking.
While I won’t spoil any of the plot details of the Season 1 finale, the show ended without a stinger just confirmation from Marvel that Season 2 was officially a go. You can see the image above clearly stating this. The episode does leave on a cliffhanger and it’ll be interesting to see how many more seasons we’ll get beyond Season 2.
There is also an expectation that Ms. Marvel is getting a second season with production heading to the United Kingdom too.
While we won’t spoil anything else from the third episode of Loki, director Kate Herron took to Instagram yesterday to double-down on comments made by Tom Hiddleston’s character Loki about his sexual preference for both would-be princes and princesses.
A huge revelation that Loki is now canonically bisexual.
“From the moment I joined [the Loki series] it was very important to me, and my goal, to acknowledge Loki was bisexual. It is a part of who he is and who I am too. I know this is a small step but I’m happy, and heart is so full, to say that this is now canon in [the MCU],” the director said in a post on Instagram (See below).
Marvel has previously tipped-toed with same thing with Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie off-screen bisexuality by Thompson herself and endorsed by Kevin Feige, but this feels like the first time a major character has been established as part of the LGBTQ+ community.
Will this be the only time it will be referenced? We’ll have to wait and see, but given that the character hasn’t really been given love interests in the past, it’s possible we might not see Loki establish same-sex relationships. But I would love to be wrong here.
One of the big things announced about Chloe Zhao’s Eternals is that Brian Tyree Henry’s character Phastos will be part of a loving same-sex family, establishing the Marvel Comics character as openly gay. I think fans are going to be excited to see themselves on the big and small screen as Marvel continues to grow their tent of representation, I’m sure folks are going to be watching carefully about how Marvel hopes to continue these character’s stories within the MCU beyond these reveals.
Loki still has more episodes to air on Disney+ and we’ll be curious to see if that comment is all we end up getting concerning his bisexuality. It’s certainly an encouraging start.
When the Walt Disney Company acquired 21st Century Fox, the rights to Marvel Comics projects such as Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Silver Surfer returned to Marvel. We know that Jon Watts (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Cop Car) is attached to direct their Fantastic Four reboot, Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool 3 is officially in the works with The Molyneux (Bob’s Burgers) handling the script, and writer/director Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice, Ant-Man, Don’t Look Up) has been publicly interested in tackling a solo Silver Surfer movie.
What seems to be something that won’t be anytime soon is their X-Men reboot, which likely won’t get a release date before 2025, as hinted to by Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige. How they’re going about with Fantastic Four could suggest that Marvel Studios may end up looking at their existing director lineup to handle the X-Men reboot.
A director that is quickly becoming a strong standout is Loki’s Kate Herron, as the series has a strong cinematic feeling and look despite being a Disney+ series. It also echos what Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni are doing with The Mandalorian slightly more than the two previous Marvel/Disney+ shows.
I bring up Kate Herron because she recently revealed in an interview with Trey Mangum that her first introduction to Marvel was the X-Men cartoon series that originally aired domestically on Fox in the 1990s.
“Basically, my first introduction to Marvel was that I loved the X-Men cartoons growing up, I was obsessed with it. I remember trying to turn my dolls into Storm…but I’d always play X-Men with my toys. I think loved it because they were outsiders and I connected with that, I was really drawn into that story,” Kate Herron said.
Having a director with that sort of connection with X-Men would be the complete opposite of Bryan Singer, who was notoriously ignorant of the source material (altering characters at whim) and according to Hugh Jackman, actively banned the comics from the set. Herron has proven she has a visually striking eye and the ability to have the scope needed for a project as big as X-Men, also being able to juggle a good amount of characters as each episode of Loki adds more players into the mix.
It wouldn’t hurt to have someone that might champion the Jim Lee era costumes that were highlighted in the Fox Kids cartoon. Going that route with the character designs would also help separate itself from the Fox films and allow Marvel Studios have their own stamp on the live-action X-Men.
I also think one key element of the X-Men franchise is the high-volume of female characters on the roster, something that wasn’t always handled properly with Fox’s era of the franchise as Bryan Singer/writers/producers took liberties with characters like Rogue and Storm. Those characters alongside Psylocke didn’t get proper adaptations with the previous incarnations. Herron’s Loki series has a strong/diverse female presence and those characters have been given a little more depth, there is hope that she could give a bigger stage to female members of the team.
While some fans will likely be keen to see The Russo Brothers return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for X-Men, they’ve been clear that what they actually want to tackle is Wolverine and Secret Wars. If they were to oversee the Secret Wars event, the X-Men would likely be involved and scratch that Wolverine itch.
I could see Kate Herron fitting nicely as the architect or godmother of the new era of the X-Men and fans like myself may feel more comfortable with the franchise in her hands after seeing her impressive work on Loki.
The Ronin has learned that Marvel Studios is expected to shoot something related to the upcoming Loki series in the United Kingdom in the near future. However, it’s unknown if this will be for the first season of the Disney+ series, brief reshoot, shooting a simple end credit scene as seen in the last two Marvel series or if Season 2 will be moving from Atlanta to London.
Unlike the previous two projects, WandaVision and Falcon & The Winter Soldier, there have been reports that Season 1 writer Michael Waldron would be returning for a second season in some capacity and would suggest we are indeed getting Season 2 of Loki. It’s unknown if director Kate Herron would be returning. If Marvel moved Season 2 to the United Kingdom, it would be a slightly more comfortable situation and accommodating as a lot of the people working on the show are British.
Marvel Studios has recently made a big push to have many of their projects film in the United Kingdom including Black Widow, Eternals, and Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness. The studio is also planning to have Moon Knight, Secret Invasion, Captain Marvel 2, Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, and Guardians of The Galaxy 3 shoot in the United Kingdom as well.
Tom Hiddleston is currently in the United Kingdom shooting another series for Apple TV+ called The Essex Serpent.
Season 1 of Loki will debut on Disney+ on June 11, 2021.
LOKI – Picking up immediately after Loki steals the Tesseract (again), he finds himself called before the Time Variance Authority, a bureaucratic organization that exists outside of time and space, forced to answer for his crimes against the timeline and given a choice: face deletion from reality or assist in catching an even greater threat.
The Multiverse is going to be a huge part of the upcoming MCU projects and one of the more interesting one so far is the Loki series starring franchise-favorite actor Tom Hiddleston time-hopping after getting his hands on the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame leading to him getting on the radar of the Time Variance Agency. A group of people that police the Multiverse in Marvel Comics and it looks like at some point Loki is recruited by them.
Loki is set to debut on Disney+ in May 2021 featuring the God of Mischief as he steps out of his brother’s shadow in a new series that takes place after the events of Avengers: Endgame. Tom Hiddleston returns as the title character, joined by Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sophia Di Martino, Wunmi Mosaku and Richard E. Grant. Kate Herron directs Loki, and Michael Waldron is head writer.
One of the highlight of the news concerning the series seems to be Marvel’s confirmation that Lovecraft Country actress Wunmi Mosaku will be in the Multiverse show.
The trailer teases that Idris Elba‘s Heimdall could be appearing during the 1970s segment with Loki as the infamous criminal D.B. Cooper. Seeing Asgard again wouldn’t be shocking after a report from Deadline has suggested that Jaimie Alexander might be showing up in the Disney+ series as Lady Sif alongside Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love & Thunder.
After watching the series trailer, I’m really looking forward to the show as it feels like live-action version of Rick & Morty, the popular sci-fi animated series at Adult Swim.
As mentioned above Loki will begin airing on Disney+ starting in May.
THE RONIN 