#and given that Loki is one of the last big universal fan favorite characters they have | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lokiondisneyplus · 3 years

Video

'Loki' takes over: Tom Hiddleston on his new TV series and a decade in the MCU

Ten years after Hiddleston first chose chaos in Thor, Marvel’s fan favorite God of Mischief is going even bigger with his time-bending Disney+ show.

Tom Hiddleston is Loki, and he is burdened with glorious purpose: After playing Thor's puckish brother for over a decade in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, no one understands the mercurial Asgardian God of Mischief as well as the actor. He can teach an entire seminar on Loki if given the opportunity — which he actually did during pre-production on his forthcoming Disney+ show. In conversation, Hiddleston quotes lines from his MCU debut, 2011's Thor, almost verbatim, and will playfully correct you if you mistakenly refer to Asgard's Rainbow Bridge as the Bifrost, which is the portal that connects Loki and Thor's homeworld to the Nine Realms, including Midgard, a.k.a. Earth. "Well, the Bifrost technically is the energy that runs through the bridge," he says with a smile. "But nine points to Gryffindor!" And when he shows up to the photo shoot for this very digital cover, he hops on a call with our photo editor to pitch ways the concept could be even more Loki, like incorporating the flourish the trickster does whenever magically conjuring something. The lasting impression is that playing Loki isn't just a paycheck.

"Rather than ownership, it's a sense of responsibility I feel to give my best every time and do the best I can because I feel so grateful to be a part of what Marvel Studios has created," the 40-year-old Brit tells EW over Zoom a few days after the shoot and a week out from Thor's 10th anniversary. "I just want to make sure I've honored that responsibility with the best that I can give and the most care and thought and energy."

After appearing in three Thor movies and three Avengers, Hiddleston is bringing that passion to his first solo Marvel project, Loki, the House of Ideas' third Disney+ series following the sitcom pastiche WandaVision and the topical The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Led by head writer Michael Waldron (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Heels), the six-episode drama sees Hiddleston's shapeshifting agent of chaos step out from behind his brother's shadow and into the spotlight for a timey-wimey, sci-fi adventure that aims to get to the bottom of who Loki really is. "I wanted to explore slightly more complex character questions," says Waldron. "It's not just good versus bad. Is anybody all good? Is anybody all bad? What makes a hero, a hero? A villain, a villain?"

Even though Loki — who loves sowing mayhem with his illusion magic and shapeshifting, all with a major chip on his shoulder — has never been one for introspection, the idea of building an entire show around him was a no-brainer for Marvel. When asked why Loki was one of the studio's first Disney+ shows, Marvel president Kevin Feige replies matter-of-factly, "More Hiddleston, more Loki." First introduced as Thor's (Chris Hemsworth) envious brother in Kenneth Branagh's Thor, Loki went full Big Bad in 2012's The Avengers. That film cemented the impish rogue as one of the shared universe's fan favorites, thanks to Hiddleston's ability to make him deliciously villainous yet charismatic and, most importantly, empathetic. The character's popularity is one of the reasons he's managed to avoid death many times.

"He's been around for thousands of years. He had all sorts of adventures," says Feige. "Wanting to fill in the blanks and see much more of Loki's story [was] the initial desire [for the series]."

The Loki we meet on the show is not the one who fought the Avengers in 2012 and evolved into an antihero in Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok before meeting his demise at the hands of the mad titan Thanos (Josh Brolin) in 2018's Avengers: Infinity War. Instead, we'll be following a Loki from a branched timeline (a variant, if you will) after he stole the Tesseract following his thwarted New York invasion and escaped S.H.I.E.L.D. custody during the time heist featured in Avengers: Endgame. In other words, this Loki hasn't gone through any sort of redemption arc. He's still the charming yet petulant god who firmly believes he's destined to rule and has never gotten his due.

Premiering June 9, Loki begins with the Time Variance Authority — a bureaucratic organization tasked with safeguarding the proper flow of time — arresting the Loki Variant seen in Endgame because they want his help fixing all of the timeline problems he caused while on the run with the Tesseract. So there will be time travel, and a lot more of it than in Endgame. As Loki makes his way through his own procedural, he'll match wits with new characters including Owen Wilson's Agent Mobius, a brilliant TVA analyst, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw's Judge Renslayer. The question in early episodes is whether Loki will help them or take over.

"One of the things Kevin Feige led on was, 'I think we should find a way of exploring the parts of Loki that are independent of his relationship with Thor,' or see him in a duality or in relationship with others, which I thought was very exciting," says Hiddleston, who also serves as an executive producer on the show. "So the Odinson saga, that trilogy of films, still has its integrity, and we don't have to reopen it and retell it."

Yet, in order to understand where Loki is going, it's important to see where he came from.

Hiddleston can't believe how long he and Loki have been connected. "I've been playing this character for 11 years," he says. "Which is the first time I have said that sentence, I realize, and it [blows] my mind. I don't know what percentage that is exactly of my 40 years of being alive, but it's substantial."

His time as Loki actually goes a bit further back, to 2009 — a year after Robert Downey Jr. big banged the MCU into existence with Iron Man — when he auditioned for Thor. It's no secret that Hiddleston initially went in for the role of the titular God of Thunder, but Feige and director Kenneth Branagh thought his natural charm and flexibility as an actor made him better suited for the movie's damaged antagonist. "Tom gave you an impression that he could be ready for anything, performance-wise," says Branagh, who had previously worked with him on a West End revival of Checkov's Ivanov and the BBC series Wallander. "Tom has a wild imagination, so does Loki. He's got a mischievous sense of humor and he was ready to play. It felt like he had a star personality, but he was a team player."

Hiddleston fully immersed himself in the character. Outside of studying Loki's history in the Marvel Comics, he also researched how Loki and the Trickster God archetype appeared across mythology and different cultures. "He understood that he was already in something special [and] it was a special character in a special part of that early moment in the life of the Marvel universe where [he] also needed to step up in other ways," says Branagh, who was impressed by the emotional depth Hiddleston brought to the part, especially when it came to how isolated Loki felt in the Asgardian royal family.

There was a lot riding on that first Thor feature. For one, no one knew if audiences would immediately latch onto a Shakespearean superhero movie partially set on an alien planet populated by the Norse Gods of legend. Second, it was integral to Feige's plans for the shared universe. Loki was supposed to be the main villain in The Avengers, which would not only mirror how Earth's mightiest heroes joined forces in 1963's Avengers #1 but also give Thor a believable reason for teaming up with Iron Man, Captain America (Chris Evans), and the rest of the capes. Feige first clued Hiddleston into those larger plans when the actor was in L.A. before Thor started shooting.

"I was like, 'Excuse me?' Because he was already three, four steps ahead," says Hiddleston. "That took me a few minutes to process, because I didn't quite realize how it just suddenly had a scope. And being cast as Loki, I realized, was a very significant moment for me in my life, and was going to remain. The creative journey was going to be so exciting."

Hiddleston relished the opportunity to go full villain in Avengers, like in the scene where Loki ordered a crowd to kneel before him outside a German opera house: "It's the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation," says the Machiavellian god. "The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel."

"I just knew that in the structure of that film, I had to lean into his role as a pure antagonist," Hiddleston recalls. "What I always found curious and complex about the way Loki is written in Avengers, is that his status as an antagonist comes from the same well of not belonging and being marginalized and isolated in the first Thor film. Loki now knows he has no place in Asgard."

Loki did find a place within the audience's hearts, though. Feige was "all in" on Hiddleston as his Loki from the beginning, but even he couldn't predict how much fans would love him. Feige recalls the reaction at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con: "Did we know that after he was the villain in two movies, he would be bringing thousands of people to their feet in Hall H, in costume, chanting his name? No, that was above and beyond the plan that we were hoping for and dreaming of." It was a dream Feige first got an inkling of a year earlier during the Avengers press tour when a Russian fan slipped past security, snuck into Mark Ruffalo's car, and asked the Hulk actor to give Hiddleston a piece of fan art she created. "That was one of the early signs there was much more happening with this quote-unquote villain."

Despite that popularity, the plan was to kill Loki off in 2013's Thor: The Dark World, but the studio reversed course after test audiences refused to believe he actually died fighting the Dark Elves. Alas, he couldn't out-illusion death forever. After returning in Taika Waititi's colorful and idiosyncratic Thor: Ragnarok, Hiddleston's character perished for real in the opening moments of Infinity War. In typical Loki fashion, before Thanos crushed his windpipe, he delivered a defiant speech that indicated he'd finally made peace with the anger he felt toward his family.

"It felt very, very final, and I thought, 'Okay, that's it. This is Loki's final bow and a conclusive end to the Odinson saga,'" says Hiddleston, who shot that well-earned death scene in 2017.

But, though he didn't know it yet, the actor's MCU story was far from over.

Credit: Charlie Gray for EW

When Hiddleston returned to film two scenes in Avengers: Endgame in 2017, he had no idea where Loki portaled off to after snatching the Tesseract. "Where'd he go? When does he go? How does he get there? These are all questions I remember asking on the day, and then not being given any answers," Hiddleston recalls. To be fair, it's likely the Powers That Be didn't necessarily have answers then. While Feige can't exactly recall when the writers' room for Endgame first devised Loki's escape sequence, he does know that setting up a future show wasn't the primary goal — because a Loki series wasn't on the horizon just yet.

"[That scene] was really more of a wrinkle so that one of the missions that the Avengers went on in Endgame could get screwed up and not go well, which is what required Cap and Tony to go further back in time to the '70s," says Feige. Soon after that, though, former Disney CEO Bob Iger approached Feige about producing content for the studio's forthcoming streaming service. "I think the notion that we had left this hanging loose end with Loki gave us the in for what a Loki series could be. So by the time [Endgame] came out, we did know where it was going."

As for Hiddleston, he didn't find out about the plans for a Loki show until spring 2018, a few weeks before Infinity War hit theaters. "I probably should not have been surprised, but I was," says the actor. "But only because Infinity War had felt so final."

Nevertheless, Hiddleston was excited about returning for his show. He was eager to explore Loki's powers, especially the shapeshifting, and what it meant that this disruptive figure still managed to find a seat beside the gods in mythology. "I love this idea [of] Loki's chaotic energy somehow being something we need. Even though, for all sorts of reasons, you don't know whether you can trust him. You don't know whether he's going to betray you. You don't why he's doing what he's doing," says Hiddleston. "If he's shapeshifting so often, does he even know who he is? And is he even interested in understanding who he is? Underneath all those masks, underneath the charm and the wit, which is kind of a defense anyway, does Loki have an authentic self? Is he introspective enough or brave enough to find out? I think all of those ideas are all in the series — ideas about identity, ideas about self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and the difficulty of it."

“The series will explore Loki's powers in a way they have not yet been explored, which is very, very exciting.”

The thing that truly sold Hiddleston on the show was Marvel's decision to include the Time Variance Authority, a move he describes as "the best idea that anybody had pertaining to the series." Feige and Loki executive producer Stephen Broussard had hoped to find a place for the TVA — an organization that debuted in 1986's Thor #372 and has appeared in She-Hulk and Fantastic Four stories — in the MCU for years, but the right opportunity never presented itself until Loki came along. "Putting Loki into his own procedural series became the eureka moment for the show," says Feige.

The TVA's perspective on time and reality also tied into the themes that Waldron, Loki's head writer, was hoping to explore. "Loki is a character that's always reckoning with his own identity, and the TVA, by virtue of what they do, is uniquely suited to hold up a mirror to Loki and make him really confront who he is and who he was supposed to be," says Waldron. Hiddleston adds: "[That] was very exciting because in the other films, there was always something about Loki that was very controlled. He seemed to know exactly what the cards in his hand were and how he was going to play them…. And Loki versus the TVA is Loki out of control immediately, and in an environment in which he's completely behind the pace, out of his comfort zone, destabilized, and acting out."

To truly dig into who Loki is, the creative team had to learn from the man who knows him best: Hiddleston. "I got him to do a thing called Loki School when we first started," says director Kate Herron. "I asked him to basically talk through his 10 years of the MCU — from costumes to stunts, to emotionally how he felt in each movie. It was fantastic."

Hiddleston got something out of the Loki school, too. Owen Wilson both attended the class and interviewed Hiddleston afterward so that he could better understand Loki, as his character Mobius is supposed to be an expert on him. During their conversation, Wilson pointedly asked Hiddleston what he loved about playing the character.

"And I said, 'I think it's because he has so much range,'" says Hiddleston. "I remember saying this to him: 'On the 88 keys on the piano, he can play the twinkly light keys at the top. He can keep it witty and light, and he's the God of Mischief, but he can also go down to the other side and play the heavy keys. And he can play some really profound chords down there, which are about grief and betrayal and loss and heartbreak and jealousy and pride.'" Hiddleston recalls Wilson being moved by the description: "He said, 'I think I might say that in the show.' And it was such a brilliant insight for me into how open Owen is as an artist and a performer.'"

Owen Wilson as Mobius and Tom Hiddleston as Loki in 'Loki.'| Credit: Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios

Everyone involved is particularly excited for audiences to see Hiddleston and Wilson's on-screen chemistry. "Mobius is not unlike Owen Wilson in that he's sort of nonplussed by the MCU," says Feige. "[Loki] is used to getting a reaction out of people, whether it's his brother or his father, or the other Avengers. He likes to be very flamboyant and theatrical. Mobius doesn't give him the reaction he's looking for. That leads to a very unique relationship that Loki's not used to."

As for the rest of the series, we know that Loki will be jumping around time and reality, but the creative team isn't keen on revealing when and where. "Every episode, we tried to take inspiration from different things," says Waldron, citing Blade Runner's noir aesthetic as one example.

"Part of the fun of the multiverse and playing with time is seeing other versions of characters, and other versions of the titular character in particular," says Feige, who also declined to confirm if Loki ties into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and/or other upcoming projects.

Making Loki was especially meaningful to Hiddleston because they shot most of it during the pandemic, in late 2020. "It will remain one of the absolute most intense, most rewarding experiences of my life," he says. "It's a series about time, and the value of time, and what time is worth, and I suppose what the experience of being alive is worth. And I don't quite know yet, and maybe I don't have perspective on it, if all the thinking and the reflecting that we did during the lockdown ended up in the series. But in some way, it must have because everything we make is a snapshot of where we were in our lives at that time."

While it remains to be seen what the future holds for Loki beyond this initial season, Hiddleston isn't preparing to put the character to bed yet. "I'm open to everything," he says. "I have said goodbye to the character. I've said hello to the character. I said goodbye to the character [again]. I've learned not to make assumptions, I suppose. I'm just grateful that I'm still here, and there are still new roads to explore."

#Tom Hiddleston #Loki #Disney+#interview

519 notes · View notes

twh-news · 3 years

Text

‘Loki’ Star Richard E. Grant on Tom Hiddleston’s Crash Course and Being Denied a Muscle Suit

[This interview contains spoilers for Loki episode five.]

If you thought Richard E. Grant and Tom Hiddleston had a passing resemblance during Loki‘s fifth episode, “Journey Into Mystery,” then you weren’t alone. In fact, the two actors have talked about their shared “physiognomy” for years, so much so that a running joke was created about them playing father and son, someday. And then, at the beginning of 2020, the gag was up as Grant received the official offer to play Classic Loki on the Hiddleston-led Loki. Since Grant missed Hiddleston’s renowned “Loki lecture” prior to production, he received his own private crash course later on in production.

“[Tom Hiddleston] was very articulate and passionate about all of that, as he’s a walking Lokipedia,” Grant tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So that was very, very useful, but to be honest, I was so anxious and nervous about my first day of work that I probably only took in about 5 percent of what he was saying to me. But by the same token, I was entering his universe, and I was hoping that I wasn’t going to let him, or the fans of this character, down.”

When Grant was first offered the job, he immediately began to envision his Classic Loki costume since he assumed it would include a muscle suit a la Jack Kirby’s rendition of the character. But once he arrived to the Loki set in Atlanta, he discovered that his own physicality would be utilized instead, much to his chagrin.

“What I was so looking forward to with Loki was finally having a muscle suit, having been born without any,” Grant says with a laugh. “I thought, ‘Oh great! I’m going to look like the Jack Kirby drawings and costume design, which was so faithful to that.’ But when I got to Atlanta, they said, ‘No, you don’t have a muscle suit. You’re just as yourself, a stick insect.’ So I was very disappointed. I thought I was letting the character and the viewers down by not having muscles underneath it. I wish that I had gone into a year’s worth of training and weight-gain powder to look like that, but I don’t think I could’ve possibly achieved that. So I was hoping I’d have the rubberized version of it, but I was denied that pleasure.”

In a recent conversation with THR, Grant also discusses Classic Loki’s ultimate sacrifice and what the character was thinking as he laughed en route to his death.

You’ve said that you and Tom Hiddleston have wanted to work together for years. When did this desire first come about?

More than anything, it came about because we recognized that we have a similar physiognomy, and somebody joked to us, “You could play father and son!” So I suppose it has always been in the back of mind. And then I saw Tom at the Toronto [International] Film Festival a couple years ago, and he said, “We really have to do something together! Father and son — or something!” But I thought it was highly unlikely because his career had gone so far up into the stratosphere. And then, at the beginning of last year, I got an offer to play Classic/Old Loki, and I thought, “Oh right, this is what we talked about and now it’s come to pass.” So that’s how it happened.

And in terms of the script, what was your first impression of Classic Loki’s full-fledged arc?

The backstory — where he describes himself as the God of Outcasts rather than the God of Mischief — was very compelling. So you understand where and why he’s been out of the loop for so long. He was so desperate to have some kind of contact that he was willing to reveal himself to the TVA, and later, by offering himself up to Asgard and Alioth, he’s willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the possibility of somebody else finding love. Because the ending was so catastrophic and mayhem-filled, as he laughs in the face of his own immolation, I thought that was a great beginning, middle and end in just one episode. It’s as much as you could ever hope for from a guest role. So it was really exciting to do and very satisfying.

As he was laughing in the face of the beast, what was on his mind?

Even as you’re going down, you still have the power, grace and sheer chutzpah to go, “I will laugh in your face even though I know that you’re about to eat me alive.” That’s a great adage to life. (Laughs.) I love that.

Since Tom has played Loki for many years, he’s become the world’s foremost authority on the character, so much so that he delivers actual lectures on him.

He is! He’s Lokipedia.

Was there enough time for him to give you a crash course on the character?

He did one of those prior to the first episode; they’d already shot four episodes by the time I got there. So he came and saw me after I had just gotten my costume and makeup done. He said, “I’m going to give you a brief outline and some background information on what you’re dealing with.” So he was very articulate and passionate about all of that, as he’s a walking Lokipedia. So that was very, very useful, but to be honest, I was so anxious and nervous about my first day of work that I probably only took in about 5 percent of what he was saying to me. But by the same token, I was entering his universe, and I was hoping that I wasn’t going to let him, or the fans of this character, down.

Classic Loki was very frustrated by the fact that betrayal is synonymous with the Loki archetype. So he did something about it and sacrificed his life to help Loki and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino). While you touched on the ultimate sacrifice already, what did you make of his decision to go against type?

It was very smart of [Tom Kauffman], the writer, to have hit on that. I was the oldest person on the unit, as well as the oldest person on the crew and the cast. When you’re in the twilight zone as I am now at 64, there is a sense that you’re handing over the baton in the relay race of life. So it seemed like the most human, vulnerable and honorable thing to do, and I got that completely. It was fitting — even for an old Classic Loki. But unlike in my life, you can always come back in Loki-land. (Laughs.)

Between Allegiant General Pryde in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Classic Loki, were these two of your favorite costume fittings to date?

Yes, and it was pretty amazing to have that great, explosive ending to that Star Wars character. But what I was so looking forward to with Loki was finally having a muscle suit, having been born without any. (Laughs.) I thought, “Oh great! I’m going to look like the Jack Kirby drawings and costume design, which was so faithful to that.” But when I got to Atlanta, they said, “No, you don’t have a muscle suit. You’re just as yourself, a stick insect.” So I was very disappointed. I thought I was letting the character and the viewers down by not having muscles underneath it. I wish that I had gone into a year’s worth of training and weight-gain powder to look like that, but I don’t think I could’ve possibly achieved that. So I was hoping I’d have the rubberized version of it, but I was denied that pleasure. (Laughs.)

On big-budget projects in particular, actors don’t always get the chance to work opposite another actor/character in any given scene. So now that you can talk about The Rise of Skywalker, did you and Ian McDiarmid actually get to be in the same room during Pryde’s hologram scene with Emperor Palpatine?

No, I never met Ian on it at all.

Between Jack Hock (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and Withnail (Withnail and I), who would enjoy Loki’s company the most? Who’d make for a more ideal companion?

Wow. I think Jack Hock because he was so gregarious and wanted to be friends with everybody. Whereas Withnail was so staggeringly selfish that I think even he would have outdone Loki in the ego department.

#loki #loki series #richard e grant #interview #article #loki spoilers #spoilers #loki series spoilers

30 notes · View notes

mxgilray · 3 years

Text

I... have some thoughts on the Loki finale. It was not what I was expecting, but I'm still hopeful for season 2.

This felt like a meh finale, like how a lot of season finales felt in Spring 2020 when they unexpectedly quit filming and had to cut things short by a couple episodes thanks to the pandemic. Only this was the planned out finale, they should've given a bit more oomph. I'm quite a fan of exposition and character development usually, but all the dialog was centered on He Who Remains, so it felt like our main characters were just side pieces.

Plus, the final "cliffhanger" of Mobius not knowing Loki and the statue of HWR replacing the Time Keeper statues felt quite lackluster. Not sure how they could've made it hit harder, but it didn't deliver the "oh shit" vibes they intended, but maybe that's cuz Mobius not remembering Loki has been an expected plot line on tumblr for half the season so it wasn't a blindside.

I get the point of the Sylki kiss. From what I've seen on tumblr so far I feel like the nuance of Sylvies actions was lost to most people (both Sylki fans and antis just Didn't Get It). It wasn't a big declaration of love like the fans are grasping onto it as, and it wasn't shoving selfcest into the canon to keep the heternormativity like antis are accusing it of being; it was Sylvie using Loki's attachment to her to trick him. She needed Loki out of her way, and she knew the only way to get past him and get He Who Remains' tempad was through emotional distraction. She used his love against him and betrayed him, a kiss was simply the most efficient way to do it. I did a whole post last week about Sylvie's feelings towards Loki, but to sum up I firmly believe that while Loki harbors some romantic feelings for Sylvie, she feels strictly platonic towards him, but is very aware of his attraction. She took advantage of his care for her to get the upper hand during their fight. Heck she even foreshadowed it herself in ep 5. "There are more important things than friends" "like taking down the TVA" she told Loki that taking down whoever is behind the TVA comes before everything; it's priority #1 in her book, above friendship or love or trust. Loki proved that his priority now is the greater good of the universe not her revenge, so Sylvie has no use for him anymore (partners only when it's convenient, because she is a Loki and that's how emotionally stunted Lokis behave).

I would like to point out the irony of her being worried about Loki betraying her, only to turn around and betray him. It's in the realm of "people who cheat assuming their partner is cheating" / "not using a turn signal when changing planes to avoid being cut off because when you see someone else use their signal you tend to cut them off", it's assuming other people will behave like you do. Sylvie feared in ep 5 that Loki would betray her in the end because she knew if it came down to it she'd betray him. But the thing is, he's actually grown past that. Loki is finally thinking about how his actions can damage others, not just his own wants and needs. Sylvie saw this moral change in Loki, realized there was no chance of getting him back on the blind revenge boat, and decided to exploit his newfound selflessness and emotional attachment to get him out of her path.

This whole season Loki has been maturing emotionally and growing into the best, most heroic version of himself. Sylvie, on the other hand, still has that deceptive, selfish, can't trust anyone persona that every Loki develops to combat insecurity. She hasn't had the emotional growth needed to see the bigger picture, she's still trapped in her own self centered mindset. As such, she disregards the impact her betrayal will have on Loki, the impact killing HWR will have on the universe. She doesn't even take a beat to consider whether revenge is still the right path cuz she doesn't practice self reflection yet; revenge has always been the goal and she refuses to give herself a chance of changing her mind. I hope in season 2 she'll get some character growth, now that her 1 goal has been accomplished.

Now on to Mobius. I enjoyed his scenes, I wish we'd been shown more of what he did to reveal the truth to the rest of the TVA. Again, I feel like too much time was given to HWR's monologing and not enough was spent on the other characters so Mobius and B-15 got very little screen time to display their plan. I am happy Mobius got the opportunity to throw Ranslayers betrayal back in her face, and his attemp at attacking her...my boy you work a desk job you ain't no fighter, she used to work in the field collecting variants, you had no chance. Also, where the F did she go??? I kept expecting her to show up at the end of time but she didn't. Where did Miss Minutes send her??

I'm sad Mobius doesn't know Loki anymore, but I can't say I'm surprised. I've got a few different thoughts on what the heck is going on with him and the TVA:

Sylvie accidentally sent Loki way back to a time early on in the TVA before HWR created the Time Keepers for anonymity. As such, this is a past Mobius who has yet to meet Loki or even learn of Loki's existence. If this is the case, then I think Loki and Past!Mobius's interaction at the end of ep 6 will be the catalyst for him becoming a Loki expert. The 63 branching timelines Mobius and B-15 are discussing before Loki interrupts are from some currently unknown disaster that'll be a plot line in s2. (This is my least favorite theory, but nevertheless a possibility)

HWR was correct when he said that if Sylvie kills him and destroys the TVA then another variant of him will just start it all up again. This variant didn't care to remain anonymous, hence the big statue of him, but kept all the memory wiped variants working there. Because time is a chaotic bitch, the changeover from one HWR variant to another may have been near seamless at the TVA and just involved a quick memory wipe of anything relating to the Time Keepers, Loki and Sylvie, or knowledge that the TVA are all variants. The 63 branches may be thanks to something Renslayer is doing like killing all the HWR variants in existence in order to negate the need for the TVA. The branching could also be from Sylvie's revenge still, we have no idea how much time has passed between her killing HWR and a new HWR taking over so the branching she caused could still be an issue.

There have actually been multiple TVAs running simultaneously, each in their own multiverse. Each one employs memory wiped variants, each one is in charge of a certain subset of timelines, and all work under the one HWR. Sylvie used HWR's tempad to eject Loki back to the TVA, but she accidentally sent him to the TVA of a different multiverse not realizing that's a Thing. The 63 branching timelines Mobius and B-15 are discussing are indeed from Sylvie killing HWR, but there's only 63 as opposed to the countless we saw diverging from Sylvie's perspective because this TVA only sees branches on timelines within their own multiverse. Mobius doesn't know Loki because he isn't our Mobius and in the multiverse he works in maybe Loki's aren't as much of an issue because none of them ever escaped the TVA like Sylvie did (or none of them have Tom's face so he doesn't recognize him as a Loki). If this is the case, then Loki is gonna have to find his way back to his own multiverse in order to be reunited with his Mobius, and that could end up happening thanks to Renslayer. Miss Minutes gave her a file that I suspect only HWR should have access to. Maybe it was tempad coordinates for other multiverses? It took til the 31st century for the multiverses to be connected despite Tony figuring out time travel in the 21st century because travel between universes is much harder, maybe HWR is still the only one who knows how to do that. (If this theory is correct then all the time travel done during Endgame was through timelines within one multiverse) Also just thought of this but what if the reason there are so many extreme variations of loki that grew to adulthood is because the criteria of "sacred timeline" is different in each multiverse. Classic Loki and maybe President Loki and Kid Loki are from the same universe as MCU Loki, but red haired Loki, Croki, Boastful Loki, etc are all from other universes. Think about it, Classic Loki, 2012 Loki, and MCU Loki all have an exact identical path up until their nexus event (or death in MCU Loki's case). I think other than identifying as female, Sylvie's childhood was identical as well and that her nexus event was coming to terms with her adoption as a child, which erased the catalyst of 2011 Thor's plot and would've changed everything for her future path. Had her adoption remained a secret and she grew up on asgard, I believe her story would mirror MCU Loki's. It mildly hit me weird that there would be such wild variation amongst Lokis, even with him being a shapeshifter, because there's a rigid sacred timeline (that supposedly the MCU movies have all adhered to) and they all felt like too big of a divergence to have been left unchecked so long. If boastful Loki was telling the truth about getting all 6 infinity stones then he should've triggered a nexus event as soon as he got more than the 3 he is "supposed to" interact with, unless in his multiverse the sacred timeline criteria is different. Another theory: the agents employed in each TVA are from multiverses other than the one they're working in. It would make sense, keep them from running into their own past by fully detaching each agent from their home timeline/universe. So the Principal!Renslayer that B-15 found will never in any future become the TVA judge we know. The one we know maybe came from the universe Loki got sent to, and that's how the two of them will end up crossing paths again.

#loki series #loki spoilers #loki #lokius #sylki #sylvie laufeydottir #mobius m mobius #tva loki #time variance authority #loki meta #mcu #marvel

39 notes · View notes

thesaltofcarthage · 3 years

Text

Loki takes over: Tom Hiddleston on his new TV series and a decade in the MCU

from Entertainment Weekly

Ten years after Hiddleston first chose chaos in Thor, Marvel’s fan favorite God of Mischief is going even bigger with his time-bending Disney+ show.

By Chancellor Agard May 20, 2021

"He's been around for thousands of years. He had all sorts of adventures," says Feige. "Wanting to fill in the blanks and see much more of Loki's story [was] the initial desire [for the series]."

Yet, in order to understand where Loki is going, it's important to see where he came from.

"It felt very, very final, and I thought, 'Okay, that's it. This is Loki's final bow and a conclusive end to the Odinson saga,'" says Hiddleston, who shot that well-earned death scene in 2017.

But, though he didn't know it yet, the actor's MCU story was far from over.

“The series will explore Loki's powers in a way they have not yet been explored, which is very, very exciting.”

Additional reporting by Jessica Derschowitz

#loki #loki series #tom hiddleston #entertainment weekly

26 notes · View notes

therachelperspective · 3 years

Photo

FILM | Black Widow [2021, dir. Cate Shortland]

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the character of Black Widow. She was the only female hero – at least in the early days of the MCU’s Avengers films – amongst a sea of men. She kicked ass without super or godly powers, she had a mysterious past before her days with S.H.I.E.L.D. There were a plethora of details that made her interesting. So the fact that it took so long for her receive her own film is blasphemous to begin with. Through the media’s hype before the film’s official release, and the claims made about Black Widow’s place in the MCU, I believe my expectations going into viewing the film were more than they should have been, and that plays a big part in why I am less than pleased with the final result.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still incredibly glad that Black Widow received her own film because you’re damn straight she deserves it, but if you’re going to declare that it will be explaining Budapest, explaining the Red Room and the creation of the Widows, explaining more of Natasha’s past (and if it was not declared as such, it’s still what we as viewers would have wanted after all this time)... Needless to say, I would have preferred an actual origins film instead of whatever this was. It’s placement as a little blip between Civil War and Infinity War, as a “What was Nat up to?” sort of thing, felt ill-placed in the MCU timeline, especially since an epilogue scene puts her amidst the period of Infinity War (as shown with her short blonde hair), and the after-credits scene jumps even further forward in time to post-Endgame. Sure, there were scenes that took place in Budapest during Black Widow, but what happened there previously and any interaction with Clint before she became part of S.H.I.E.L.D. was only briefly (and I mean VERY BRIEFLY) mentioned in a short passing scene. The Red Room and how Natasha became a Widow, still only touched on in mere moments during an opening sequence, nothing more than what we’ve seen in previous Avengers films (i.e. Age of Ultron’s flashback scenes). But her time as part of the KGB? Any interaction with the Winter Soldier? Completely absent. Black Widow, unfortunately, failed in my perspective to do anything other than bring her back together with her old “family” and then, with them, merely going through a bunch of a big budget fight/escape scenes with the bad guys. When I then also read that director Cate Shortland had no experience directing budget action films, I came to the realization that Black Widow did rely a great deal on fantastical visuals to distract from the limited story, and it didn’t even do it that well. Instead of a true glimpse into the past of a most tight-lipped Avenger, we get another bang-bang-shoot-’em-up action movie to add more red to her ledger. Every male Avenger got better story treatment, over a series of films no less, than Natasha in her one and probably only standalone tale. Long story short: sure, they gave Black Widow a film, but they still did her reaaaal dirty.

Despite its incredible shortcomings, I’m still trying hard to like it. I want to like it, and enjoy what I was given. The humor throughout the film, especially from David Harbor’s Alexei Shostakov (a.k.a. the very obvious comedic relief character), was entertaining; Rachel Weisz has not seemed to age at all and it was great to see her amongst the action as mother figure and badass scientist Melina Vostokoff. But we all know the true shining star of Black Widow other than Scarlett Johansson in her final role as Natasha... was that of Florence Pugh as “baby sister” Yelena Belova. Although I was admittedly fond of Florence before seeing Black Widow, she was quite outstanding as Yelena and her chemistry with Scarlett undeniable; I really did like her in this role. It’s really no surprise that they will be/are making way for her and her character to become a bigger part of future MCU entertainment. I’m not complaining there. AND... although I was hoping for more, I also cannot complain about any “easter eggs” or commentary from Black Widow that connect it to the other films, because that’s truthfully my favorite part of the MCU as a whole – the way that everything is so intricately connected. I can’t help but smile when they make references spanning 13+ years; their dedication to that is really what makes them successful.

Was I disappointed? Yes. I won’t lie. Almost every good scene was shown in the trailers (the film itself just providing more context), and I think there was only one twist I didn’t see coming. But so much, even the details from the film itself, were poorly explained, if explained at all. I shouldn’t have had to research or come across information when reading various items on the internet to clarify as many details that I did. I shouldn’t have had to know information from the comics (which I have not read) to fill in some of the blanks. The MCU even claimed that you would not have to watch their shows in order to understand the films, when in actuality the final end-credit scene makes a helluva lot more sense if you had. Granted, I would watch the shows regardless, I just would have liked to know that I should have watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and/or Loki first instead of, say, Googling who the heck Valentina Allegra de Fontaine is.

Black Widow, on IMDb alone – I don’t dare venture further out into the Internet for this one – is flooded with poor reviews, and it really does pain me the amount of truth contained in the few I skimmed. Florence Pugh carried the film; Natasha was a sidekick in her own movie; Taskmaster (who I don’t know enough to say anything about here) was ruined... but the thing that bothers me most, as one reviewer stated perfectly, is that this is “the first MCU film I’ve hated, and I’m shook.”

I wouldn’t go all the way to “hate” per se, as I'll always love Marvel and the cinematic universe it has built, but... Me too, buddy. Me too.

#black widow #natasha romanoff #natalia alianovna romanova #yelena belova #alexei shostakov #red guardian #melina vostokoff #scarlett johansson #florence pugh #rachel weisz #david hardbour #marvel #marvel cinematic universe #MCU

12 notes · View notes

uhlikzsuzsanna · 3 years

Link

The actor reflects on Classic Loki's big move, and shares his disappointment over not getting to act opposite scene partner Ian McDiarmid in 'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.'

[This interview contains spoilers for Loki episode five.]

“What I was so looking forward to with Loki was finally having a muscle suit, having been born without any,” Grant says with a laugh. “I thought, ‘Oh great! I’m going to look like the Jack Kirby drawings and costume design, which was so faithful to that.’ But when I got to Atlanta, they said, ‘No, you don’t have a muscle suit. You’re just as yourself, a stick insect.’ So I was very disappointed. I thought I was letting the character and viewers down by not having muscles underneath it. I wish that I had gone into a year’s worth of training and weight-gain powder to look like that, but I don’t think I could’ve possibly achieved that. So I was hoping I’d have the rubberized version of it, but I was denied that pleasure.”

In a recent conversation with THR, Grant also discusses Classic Loki’s ultimate sacrifice and what the character was thinking as he laughed en route to his death.

You’ve said that you and Tom Hiddleston have wanted to work together for years. When did this desire first come about?

And in terms of the script, what was your first impression of Classic Loki’s full-fledged arc?

As he was laughing in the face of the beast, what was on his mind?

Since Tom has played Loki for many years, he’s become the world’s foremost authority on the character, so much so that he delivers actual lectures on him.

He is! He’s Lokipedia.

Was there enough time for him to give you a crash course on the character?

Between Allegiant General Pryde in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Classic Loki, were these two of your favorite costume fittings to date?

Yes, and it was pretty amazing to have that great, explosive ending to that Star Wars character. But what I was so looking forward to with Loki was finally having a muscle suit, having been born without any. (Laughs.) I thought, “Oh great! I’m going to look like the Jack Kirby drawings and costume design, which was so faithful to that.” But when I got to Atlanta, they said, “No, you don’t have a muscle suit. You’re just as yourself, a stick insect.” So I was very disappointed. I thought I was letting the character and viewers down by not having muscles underneath it. I wish that I had gone into a year’s worth of training and weight-gain powder to look like that, but I don’t think I could’ve possibly achieved that. So I was hoping I’d have the rubberized version of it, but I was denied that pleasure. (Laughs.)

No, I never met Ian on it at all.

Between Jack Hock (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and Withnail (Withnail and I), who would enjoy Loki’s company the most? Who’d make for a more ideal companion?

*** Loki is now streaming every Wednesday on Disney+.

#Loki #Loki series #Tom Hiddleston #Lokipedia #Richard E. Grant #hollywoodreporter #interview #2021.07.13.#spoilers #episode 5 spoilers

11 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 3 years

Text

Marvel Boss Has News for Fans Waiting on Avengers 5

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

In 2008, Marvel Studios started building something special. With the Robert Downey Jr.-led Iron Man they had a hit on their hands, and they set about constructing a cinematic universe using the film as a strong foundation.

Three years later, they would introduce Thor and Captain America by giving the characters their own solo movies, and in The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2 Bruce Banner and Black Widow had joined the party. Hawkeye and Nick Fury were also being mixed into the Marvel batter, and soon the whole thing was ready to bake in 2012’s The Avengers.

For the first time, audiences got to see the Avengers teaming up on the big screen to stop their first apocalypse, and fans couldn’t get enough. Avengers: Age of Ultron and Avengers: Infinity War would follow – the latter filmed back to back with the concluding part of the Infinity Saga, Avengers: Endgame.

Endgame was a slam dunk, and it briefly became the highest-grossing film of all time. But in winding up the stories of most of the OG Avengers, Marvel had set itself a rather unenviable task: reimagine and partially rebuild the MCU in a fourth phase with new characters and stories in a cinematic landscape where fans still wanted to see more of their favorites.

Marvel promised to deliver that up to a point – there are new installments for Thor, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, Ant-Man and the Guardians of the Galaxy on the way, along with numerous Disney+ shows for other familiar (and not so familiar) MCU faces. A series starring fan favorite villain Loki has already been an undisputed hit for the streamer, and given fans a taste of Marvel’s multiverse-embracing future.

But making another Avengers movie and laying the necessary groundwork for audience anticipation takes time, and Marvel boss Kevin Feige set out to explain why in a new interview.

“I think we want there to be a reasonable amount of time from Endgame to start a new saga, which is already underway and already started,” Feige told Collider. “And then you need time, as you did in Phase 1, to build that saga before you start bringing everyone together.”

But the act of “bringing everyone together” might look a little different than it did during the Infinity Saga. There have been various rumors in the last couple of years that Marvel are now planning several different scenarios in an effort to not only recapture the Avengers franchise magic, but deliver something bigger, and this would certainly make financial sense. After all, why have just one blockbuster team-up movie when you can have, well, more than one?

There are the rumors of the Thunderbolts – an antihero team that might include John Walker, Yelena Belova, Taskmaster, Ghost, The Abomination and Baron Zemo led by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine – being built in the MCU.

There’s a possible Young Avengers crew waiting in the wings that could feature the likes of Kid Loki, Cassie Lang, Wiccan, Speed and America Chavez.

Then there are the superheroes currently leading their own franchises who could absolutely front a regular Avengers movie, like Doctor Strange, Shang-Chi, Scarlet Witch, Thor and Spider-Man.

Interestingly, Marvel is also heavily-rumored be plotting another spectacular team-up movie with the Avengers, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. Secret Wars writer Jim Shooter recently claimed he’d had a call from Marvel regarding some of the characters that he’d utilized in the iconic Marvel Comics run, including Beyonder, Titania and Spider-Woman.

If you’re not familiar with the mid-80s limited series, it was a massive crossover event that featured a huge roster of Marvel heroes and villains being thrown together on an unfamiliar world. Not only did the X-Men have to fight alongside the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, but Doctor Doom, Galactus, Kang the Conqueror and Magneto all had their parts to play.

At this point, “when will Marvel release Avengers 5?” might not be the question fans should be asking. “When will Marvel start releasing the first of their huge new team-up movies?” may well be more appropriate.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The post Marvel Boss Has News for Fans Waiting on Avengers 5 appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2XCLrd7

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

2 notes · View notes

aurorawest · 4 years

Text

Title: All the Time in the Universe Author: @aurorawest Rating: M (implied sexual content) Relationships: Loki/Stephen Strange Warnings: referenced temporary character death Prompt Filled: day 3, Eternal Relationship for @marvelspookytoberprompts Word Count: 2.2k Summary: Loki and Stephen have been together a long time. A long time. It never gets old.

Or, Loki and Stephen Strange, on the occasion of their 500th anniversary.

“What do you want to do today?” Stephen asked. “Five hundred years is a pretty big one.”

Smiling slightly, Loki said, “Yes, what is it, the vibranium anniversary?”

“I think that’s one hundred.”

read it on AO3

It had taken Loki a long time to learn a valuable, obvious lesson: you don’t know what the future holds. Even for someone like him, whose life would stretch out millennia, who would watch the rise and fall of shorter-lived beings and their technologies, their civilizations, their worlds, could experience great upheaval in mere moments. Life could take a swing at him and knock him, spinning, from the path that he was sure he’d been on; so sure that he’d never thought to look for other paths that the Norns may have paved for him.

Or not paved, as the case may have been. Some of those paths had been pretty rough, over the years. A slightly more trampled bit of ground to follow; markers on trees. It had rarely been clear.

And then sometimes it was.

Loki woke to the feeling of fingers running up and down his bare back. After all these years, he was attuned to those hands, to every twitch, every tremor; the good days and bad. This was a good day. They were hardly trembling at all, sure as they followed a line up his spine and then back down.

With a smile, Loki turned his face into his pillow, allowing himself to focus on nothing but the sensation of being touched. He felt lips, then the scratchiness of a beard, on his shoulder. “Happy five hundredth anniversary,” a voice said quietly.

Pressed against the pillow, his smile grew broader, but how was he supposed to pretend to remain asleep after that? Loki rolled over, his hand sliding along the familiar groove of Stephen Strange’s hip, as he faced his husband, the love of his very long life, his soul mate. “Counting from when?” Loki asked.

Stephen looked almost the same as the day Loki had pulled him from Valhalla—somewhere between fifty and fifty-five, gray just beginning to pepper his goatee and to spread from his temples to the rest of his hair. This belied his actual age—somewhere in the region of six hundred years old, not counting, obviously, the time he’d spent in Valhalla.

A smile pulling at his mouth, Stephen said, “March 20, 2030.”

“Ah. So this requires math.” There was the first fifty-two years. Stephen’s eight hundred years in Valhalla didn’t count, though Loki had been faithful to his memory all that time. How could he have so much as looked at anyone else after Stephen Strange?

Then there were the four hundred and forty-eight years that had come after Valhalla had burned, when Loki had been able to save one person. There were many he could have chosen. He felt guilty that he hadn’t considered any of them, even for a second. Not so guilty that he would have changed his decision, though, nor guilty enough to have ever regretted it.

“Uh huh.” Stephen’s eyes, blue in the light of the spaceship they had spent the last three years on, met Loki’s, wrinkles fanning out at the corners of them. It was so odd, such a continuous marvel, to wake up and see Stephen unchanged year after year—or at least, changed so slowly that it was almost imperceptible. He had refused Asgardian longevity in his first life, not that Loki had known how to grant it. He would have gone to the ends of the universe, to the ends of every universe, if Stephen had wanted it, though.

Things had changed. Valhalla was no more. Stephen had lived his life, had died, had gone there, and now lived again. A second life. This time, Loki had been able to grant the longevity—and Stephen had taken it. “I’m not going anywhere without you ever again,” he’d said as Loki had clutched at him. To be honest, Loki may not have given him the choice. Stephen had been dead for just over eight hundred years and not an hour had gone by that Loki hadn’t missed him in all those centuries; now that he had him back, now that he was flesh and blood and standing in front of Loki again, he would never let him go.

It had been a moot point though. Stephen had felt the same way.

“Mm.” Loki slid a hand over Stephen’s face, leaned forward, and kissed him. Stephen’s kiss was as slow as it had always been. Like they had all the time in the universe. Once they hadn’t. Now they did. Loki still kissed as insistently as he always had. “March 20, 2030,” Loki mused as he broke the kiss. “That’s a long time ago, now.”

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Stephen said with a grin.

Loki rolled his eyes. “You remember everything, so that’s not saying all that much.”

Stephen’s grin grew more crooked and he wrapped an arm around Loki’s back, pulling Loki against him. Before Stephen had died, during that first life, Loki had mostly slept in pajamas. After Stephen’s resurrection, all Loki had wanted to do was be in physical contact with him, as much skin as possible touching at all times. Honestly, there may have been a six to seven day stretch at the beginning where they hadn’t gotten out of bed, too intent on remembering every plane, every nook and cranny, every dip of bone and muscle, every scar, on each other’s bodies.

With that photographic memory of his, Stephen had had a distinct advantage—that, and the fact that Loki’s body had never changed all that much to begin with. While Stephen’s body had been in a constant state of aging, Loki had remained static. The curse and the benefit of being Asgardian. But Loki had never forgotten what Stephen could do to him, and Stephen had breathed, halfway through the first time, that no amount of remembering could ever make up for the real thing.

Anyway. They were marginally better at keeping their hands off each other these days. Marginally. But one of Loki’s favorite parts of the day was getting undressed and sliding under the sheets, feeling Stephen’s warm skin against his.

Of course, Loki had changed. He’d gotten older, in those eight hundred years. For the duration of their first five decades together, Stephen had always appeared older, aging at a normal human rate, the apparent gap of years between them growing more and more jarring as Loki remained eternally, to all appearances, a man in his thirties.

Now, they appeared the same age. Stephen had chosen to remain fifty years old in Valhalla, which Loki hadn’t ever asked about, because he assumed he knew why—it was the age that Stephen had been when the two of them had finally come together. They aged at the same rate now.

Loki had worried at one time that Stephen would get bored with it. With him. After all, Stephen was still human. Nothing about him had evolved or developed for this kind of eternal relationship, being with the same person day in and day out, the same body, the same personality quirks. The slow march of years and of being surrounded by the same people was something Loki was built for. And if Stephen had grown bored with him, Loki wouldn’t have stopped him from leaving. It would have broken his heart, of course, but that was nothing new. Loki was a bit of a perpetual victim of a broken heart.

So far, the worry had turned out to be baseless.

“What do you want to do today?” Stephen asked. “Five hundred years is a pretty big one.”

Smiling slightly, Loki said, “Yes, what is it, the vibranium anniversary?”

“I think that’s one hundred.”

Loki chuckled and played with the hair at the back of Stephen’s neck. “I’m not sure there’s all that much to do. We’re in deep space. We’re so far outside the jump network that it would take months to get back to anything we knew.” Running his fingers through Stephen’s hair, he added, “It’s times like this that I miss our sling rings, I’ll be honest.”

“Yeah.” Stephen kissed him again. “Then again, all my favorite restaurants are closed in the Village, now. There’s not much point in even visiting anymore. The neighborhood’s really changed.”

“The neighborhood is under water,” Loki snorted.

“I think they pulled off kind of a Venice-y thing with the canals.”

Manhattan was actually quite pretty these days, but Stephen was right—it wasn’t his Manhattan, and it wasn’t Loki’s either. Even though Loki had lived on Earth far longer than Stephen had, his Manhattan would always be 21st century Manhattan, the one he’d walked with Stephen as they’d gotten to know each other, as they’d fallen in love without realizing what was happening.

Though he wouldn’t mind a slice of pizza right now, if he was being honest.

“What do you want to do?” Loki asked. When a sly smile pulled at Stephen’s mouth, the same smile that had led to Loki shedding his clothes at the merest hint of it for five hundred years, Loki said, “I mean, obviously. In between doing that.”

In a musing tone, Stephen said, “How about…we list our five hundred favorite moments together.”

Wrinkling his nose, Loki said, “I may be sentimental, Strange, but I’m not nauseating. Try again.”

Stephen laughed. “You just know I’d win.”

“Oh, so it’s a competition to see who can come up with our relationship’s most romantic moments?”

“Absolutely.” Stephen’s fingers stroked Loki’s back. “There’s a prize for participating.”

“Oh?” Loki asked. “Is it sex? Because it seems to me that I’m getting that regardless.”

“It’s really great sex.”

A smile twitched at Loki’s mouth. “This feels rather like an attempt to trap me into saying we always have great sex.”

“I mean.” With a flash of a grin, Stephen said, “If you want to, I’ll let you cheat and say that all five hundred of our best moments were in bed.”

Arching an eyebrow, Loki replied, “In bed being merely shorthand in his case, I assume? We’ve had our fair share of…moments in places besides bed.”

His fingers slipping lower, Stephen said, “Remember that time at the US Capitol—?”

Loki laughed. “Those hearings about magic, yes. How could I forget? It was endlessly entertaining watching them tie themselves in knots over my testimony. They had no idea of what questions to ask, let alone the knowledge to understand my answers.” Rolling his eyes, he added, “Fools.”

“Sturdy sinks in the bathrooms, though,” Stephen said.

“That was the only worthwhile part of the whole ordeal.”

With a chuckle, Stephen asked, “So where are we putting that one on the list? Mid three hundreds?”

Pursing his lips, Loki replied, “Oh, I think at least two hundred and eighty.”

“Okay, okay,” Stephen said. “I guess it’s not every day that the Senate Minority Leader congratulates you on scoring during the recess.”

Loki’s hands, still playing idly with Stephen’s hair, stilled. “That didn’t happen.”

Stephen raised his eyebrows. “Swear to god. He looked jealous. I think he was into you.”

Slipping a hand over Stephen’s neck to rest his fingers on the side of Stephen’s face, Loki said, “Well. You know you’re the only human I’ve ever had eyes for.” When Stephen smiled softly, Loki leaned forward and kissed him, taking his time for once. Five hundred years of kissing Stephen like this—he could do it for five hundred thousand.

“You know I couldn’t possibly limit myself to five hundred of our best moments, even if I was inclined to engage in something so saccharine,” Loki finally murmured, his eyes closed.

“That is sentimental,” Stephen said. His nose brushed Loki’s, and then the two of them were kissing again slowly. All the time in the universe.

“We’re pretty good together, aren’t we?” Stephen finally asked, minutes later. It might have been longer. If time had a tendency to stand still on these long haul space missions, then the tendency was exacerbated by their hands and mouths on each other.

This bit of understatement made Loki grin. “Well, we have had five hundred years to perfect this,” he said. Unspoken was the fact that they would only get better over the next five hundred, and the five hundred after that.

Loki supposed he still hadn’t answered Stephen’s question about what he wanted to do for this anniversary. Kissing Stephen again quickly, Loki said, “Get up. We’ll have breakfast.”

“Maybe your brother will call and wish us happy anniversary,” Stephen said.

Rolling his eyes good-naturedly, Loki said, “Probably. I suppose we should be dressed if that comes to pass.”

Stephen shifted in bed, propping himself up on an elbow to look down at Loki. Then, running a hand from Loki’s shoulder, down his chest, Stephen said, “I love you.”

Loki put his hand over Stephen’s, which had come to rest over his heart. There was nothing he could do but smile. He had this. It was more than he’d ever thought possible, certainly more than he’d ever thought he deserved. It was everything. “Happy anniversary, Stephen,” Loki said.

Sometimes the path was clear. What the two of them had been signposted for a long time.

Even though he’d just told him to get up, Loki wrapped his arms around Stephen and pulled him back down on top of him.

#marvelspookytober #marvelspookytoberprompts #froststrange #strangefrost #loki fanfiction #stephen strange fanfiction #loki odinson #loki laufeyson #stephen strange #doctor strange #doctor strange fanfiction #mcu #mcu fanfiction #fanfiction

2 notes · View notes

ryanmeft · 5 years

Text

MCU Phases 4 and 5 Wishlist

Last night at San Diego Comic Con, Marvel dropped their pants and coated the audience in a thick, rich layer of big-and-small screen announcements. Briefly recapped: across Phases 4 or 5 (not that that means anything), we’re getting Black Widow, The Eternals, Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther 2, Captain Marvel 2, the Fantastic Four and Blade. On the streaming front, the previously announced series were all confirmed, and in a move most probably didn’t see coming, Marvel added a series based on their often bizarre What if? Series, which speculates on what might have happened had some element of continuity gone a different way (and which has become a bit moot in the comics in an era where continuity is gleefully mixed and nixed whenever an editor wants a sales boost).

As folks might be aware, I’m not a huge fan of Disney, skipping almost all their movies, but I have a severe weakness for the MCU. There’s a lot of wish lists going around as to what we want to happen in these movies and series, but as you know if you’ve read my blog before, the correct answers are mine. Since you can rest assured these answers are the best, I graciously share them with you now. Remember, I’m never wrong.

Mjolnir Gets Retired

I am totally down with Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster as the God of Thunder. There will be those who call to give her the same powers and weapons Thor had, but why would we want to do that? In the comics, she’s still Jane Foster while Thor is still Thor, and with Chris Hemsworth also in the film, there’s no reason to think that won’t be the case here. Instead of simply “Female Thor”, she needs her own set of traits and skills. Start with giving her a new weapon; a magical spear would be just right. Mjolnir got its greatest moment of glory in Endgame, and from a sheer story perspective, it is time to retire the venerated hammer.

Rebellion in Wakanda

I’m going to be in the minority on this, but: the Dora Milaje have gotten shafted in the MCU thus far. In the best of the comics, they are the king’s guard, but they are also a group of women with independent minds and goals who don’t always agree with the king. In fact, members have rebelled several times. In the movies to date, they exist to devote total fealty to T’Challa, never once seriously questioning anything he does. This is a terrible fate to befall an actor with Danai Gurira’s fire. Instead of existing merely to poke holes in things on behalf of a (male) ruler, it’s time these ass-kicking ladies got to play a more important, and complex, role.

Christoph Waltz as Doom

This idea isn’t mine, but was passed on by a friend who is clearly brilliant. There’s not much to say about this one: the actor who made his reputation playing two very different roles in Quenton Tarantino films is the perfect choice for the literally tin-plated dictator. As for the rest of the cast, Keanu Reeves is the favorite for Reed, but I have another idea in mind for him...

The Master of Time

That said: it’s about time to get Kang involved in this universe. When it became obvious that Endgame was going to involve time travel, I slapped together what I thought was a pretty good post-credits tease that would introduce both him and the Fantastic Four side of the universe. Obviously, nothing like that happened, and there were no Avengers movies or mass team-ups of any kind announced at SDCC. Yet with time travel established, the potential to bring in this reality-warping mega-baddie is always there.

Don’t Undo Iron Man 3

Yes, fans are shooting their shorts over the fact that the real Mandarin will be the villain of the Shang-Chi movie. But those of us who don’t rub the comics on ourselves regularly recognize the truth: Iron Man 3 had a great twist that was one of the few truly creative decisions in a modern blockbuster, and it would be a shame to overturn on the whim of a handful of hardliners. Have a “real” Mandarin, but keep Ben Kingsley’s washed-up, hedonistic actor on the books. Maybe even give him a cameo.

Unrelenting Nightmare

Director Scott Derickson has already said he wants to use Nightmare, a being who feeds off his namesake, in the Doctor Strange sequel, and given that it is apparently multiverse-focused (and that Strange has few interesting villains), this is probably a given. Marvel has been after Keanu Reeves for a long time; most people seem to want him for Reed Richards, but may I humbly suggest we go against the hype and cast him as a dimension-devouring trickster deity instead? As a side note, please, please follow up on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Baron Mordo. He was the best part of the first film, and it’d be a shame to let him trail off into the ether.

Take Some Risks in Captain Marvel

Captain Marvel was fun. It was not the kind of movie that took risks, however, or blew anyone away, despite amazing box office numbers. CM will be an idol for little girls; it’s time to think outside the box, utilize the oddness of Marvel’s galactic properties, and make her next movie one that can rival the time-hopping chances DC has taken with Wonder Woman. Brie Larson needs more to do than pose heroically and hit things.

Where’s Spider-Man?

More of a question answered than a wish: a lot of people are freaking out because Spider-Man was not mentioned last night, despite a post-credits tease that’s impossible to ignore. Relax: the deal between Marvel and Sony likely just means Sony has to finalize plans and sign off on the next film before Marvel can announce it. Far From Home cracked 800 million at the box office, and the refurbishing of Spidey’s tarnished reputation by Marvel is one big reason Sony’s own dull, uninspired Venom series is now a viable money-maker. It would be the height of stupidity for Sony to pull out of the deal now; expect Spider-Man: Homeboy or whatever it is called to be announced for 2021 before much time passes.

Make What If? Truly Bizarre

As a series, What If? wasn’t always great, but it was always interesting. There are some obvious concepts they could include in the series, and probably on the top of most people’s lists is “What If Iron Man had survived Endgame?” Old Man Tony would be absolutely delicious, but we can get stranger than that. This series should be a chance to explore concepts that would never fly in a massive, internationally-marketed blockbuster movie. Think stuff like “What If Loki had been Thor?” or “What If Peggy Carter had been Captain America?” Get wild up in this.

Make Loki a Reverse Doctor Who

Loki became a far less evil, far more complex character by the time he was dispatched in Infinity War. The Loki that will star in the series, however, is the one from Avengers, before all that character development. Audiences didn’t truly and completely fall in love with him until he went from evil god of chaos to a more ambivalent trickster figure, so pulling off sympathy for this older Loki across an entire series will be difficult. The obvious answer is to make him a sort of reverse Doctor: instead of an eternally-helpful alien who influences everyone he meets for the better, he’s an alien out for himself who is gradually influenced by those he meets to be (a little) better.

37 notes · View notes

thoughtprovider · 2 years

Text

Is Spider-Man: No Way Home a Good Movie or Just Nostalgia-Bait?

It’s hard to tell, in the throes of its still-active record setting, how Spider-Man: No Way Home will be most remembered. After all, unqualified box-office records are essentially made to be broken, and their existence is most useful when shouted by a studio rep during the victory lap that is a theatrical run with strong legs, but less useful as a thing you can depend on to last. It won’t be the third-biggest worldwide opening of all time forever, but it is right now; it possibly won’t be the biggest worldwide opening of all time for Sony’s Columbia Pictures forever, but it is right now; true too with the record for second-biggest domestic debut of all time. Ask James Cameron’s heartstrings, the best a record-breaker can hope for is that they will themselves do the breaking.

With a name that can be easily confused in the IP-filled mind with its recent predecessors, No Way Home might not even be remembered by its own name in the mind of the general moviegoer. But in a spoiler-filled world, there is little doubt that it will at the very least be remembered as “the one with all the other Spider-Men in it”. That is, until we get a Clone Saga adaptation, or a big-budget Ben Reilly arc. That’s not a bad thing to settle for,

although, in a world of inevitable backlash, and people loving things then getting ashamed, cold feet and deciding they actually hate that thing, the only armor a piece of cinema art has is the strength of its quality over time. Will a person growing up outside of a hype cycle like it? A person who did not grow up with either a Toby Maguire Spidey or an Andrew Garfield one (or

even a Tom Holland?). Can the powerful rush of well-deployed nostalgia work on someone who doesn’t know the thing being referenced? Ultimately—is Spider-Man: No Way Home actually a great movie, or simply a well-liked okay movie, buoyed by its fan-friendly attitude?

It’s easy to have doubts. Avengers: Endgame was a narrative flex that broke the ankles of alleged imitators at the time (an IP-gathering that began in Avengers: Infinity War, it could be argued that the lamentable closing episodes of HBO’s temporary fan-favorite Game of Thrones wanted to execute a similar family reunion, as well as the divisive Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker). Often imitated, not-yet duplicated, if there’s a textbook case on how to bypass cognition and stab a rolled-up comic book right at the pleasure sensors, it is Avengers: Endgame. On paper it’s a no-brainer, and when sitting through it, the brain is beside the point. It is a film that feels great to watch, and to re-watch. It’s all over the place in all the best ways. It just works, and it might be luck, but it happened, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe has still not really recovered from that well-executed climax.

Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Eternals can be viewed, in a way, as extended walks of shame, the world’s favorite superhero stable shuffling in its Uggs back to the drawing board after a ribald decade that is now just a blur. It’s characters still can’t help but talk about plot points that happened back when Joss Whedon was doing the writing, like it can’t believe it actually did that. The Hawkeye series on Disney+ opens with an Avengers musical (and Kate Bishop- featuring flashbacks) that mines moments from Marvel’s Avengers that were already mined in Endgame and elsewhere (like on Loki, also on the Disney streamer). The characters in these new offerings—many of them new to this universe—can’t help but wonder, where do we go from here, how do we get butts in seats? And there was a threat that nobody actually knew.

The answer, it seems, is to go back into the arms of a more familiar love, one who knows us. Right now, as we wait for an X-Man, those arms belong to a Spider-Man.

Jon Watts, the director of all our Tom Holland Spider-Man films, was given a tremendous golden goose by that very name—Tom Holland. An inarguably gifted actor who need do naught more than flatten his British accent to make us see not him but Peter Parker. But his two previous Spider-Man movies (Homecoming and Far From Home, 2017 and 2019 respectively), while great in all of their Spider-Man ways, were also saddled with existing in the run-up to, and immediate aftermath of, that pleasure-sensor dominating flex that was the MCU’s first-decade conclusion. They had to fit a lot of MCU stuff into his space, as a result. A ground-level, New York hero with global, intergalactic potential, the Peter Parker of previous comics and cartoons often had similar stakes to a character like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Protect your neighborhood, protect your family and friends, fight monsters that both represent your anxieties and prevent you from just being a kid.

Prior to his most recent film, the MCU Peter Parker has been able to engage at this ground-level in spurts with his movies being very much big, Tony Stark-level affairs. In Far From Home, he barely spends time in the city that informs him at all. They move quickly, and are fun, and Tom Holland prevents them from becoming disorienting, but one can feel the hand of Kevin Feige trying to get as much use out of Spider-Man while he still can, as Disney’s tentative alliance with Sony could be destroyed at any time, especially as Tom Hardy’s Venom started to become a genuine hit in its own right, proving Sony could do crowd-pleasing on their own, even if they still hadn’t quite cracked how to please a critic.

Going into No Way Home, one could be excused for expecting more of the same. With Holland speaking plainly about his ending contract in the weeks leading up to its release, the mindset during the production phase could easily be one of, Won’t it be sad you won’t see Tom Holland play with your friends anymore?

But that is not what happened. Maybe a craven acquiescence to Amy Pascal and Sony, maybe more low-key Kevin Feige masterminding, No Way Home is not here to do big narrative lifts for the MCU. It’s not even really here to change the game for Sony’s own Spidey- villain/Venom franchise (despite a Let There Be Carnage stinger teasing as much, and an impending, now-delayed, Mobius feature on the horizon). Don’t call it a love-letter, but the third Tom Holland Peter Parker movie manages to, finally, be very much about Peter Parker and his relationships. The very important inclusion of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange manages to not really pull attention away from Holland, but toward him. It hits the beat of another male figure to guide Peter, but the real emotional guidance is given, finally, to Marissa Tomei’s Aunt May. Holland gets to display his very-real chemistry with Zendaya’s MJ and Jacob Batalon’s Ned Leeds. In the film’s early goings, we can feel it wresting itself from the globe-trotting as it plops Holland right back into high-school via time jump, as if aware that something would be lost and hard to get back if the audience isn’t reminded that Peter Parker is just a boy, with a lot of stories that work best while that is still the case.

It’s not even completely sensical! Him just going back to school in this scenario. But it is necessary and so works for the forgiving because it could be no other way. Dr. Strange barely putting up a fight as this kid wants to alter a condition of human existence (memory) for personal gain is not totally reasonable either, but it too works because it too needs to.

These are the conditions that a future generation watching this movie might find quibble with. To its credit today, the film introduces no new characters, and proves how powerful a film can be by digging into the characters its established in previous entries. That alone will hurt a film’s chances of being loved a generation later, if that generation hasn’t spend the requisite time with those characters already. The classic original Star Wars films successively introduce new characters, but does that add to their aging well or is it beside the point? Does a piece of art have to age well in order to be of powerful value now?

At any rate—enter the Spider-Men. Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield, having played Peter Parker for directors Sam Raimi and Marc Webb, respectively, more than its villains help bring No Way Home up to the level of must-see viewing for a modern audience. Garfield especially. A charismatic actor with a twitchy take on Peter Parker, Garfield has thus far played the role in films that are honestly hard to watch. Not unlike Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four or *checks credits* Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story (and, to a lesser extent, Rise of Skywalker) there is something almost soul-crushing about watching a film visibly held together by studio notes and test-screening-negotiated reshoots. For an empathetic viewer, it’s written all over the actors’ faces. Announced as a reboot that would be penned by Zodiac writer James Vanderbilt, Garfield’s trilogy was mired by exec cold-feet almost from the very beginning. With Garfield coming from Fincher-land via the Social Network, it was genuinely exciting—to movie fans and the actor himself—to imagine what the writer of one of David Fincher’s best movies might bring to one of Marvel’s most iconic characters. Instead we got a trilogy Sony deemed not worth completing, in part because audiences had deemed it not quite worth shelling out money to see.

To witness Garfield finally getting to do his thing in a movie helmed with a sure hand is an aspect of this movie that packs a punch, even, it seems, for those who liked the Amazing Spider-Man films. Maguire, with at least one classic under his belt in Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, has less of this immediately-cathartic baggage, but still has a Spider-Man 3-shaped dint in his armor. With Venom already rehabbed-ish in public opinion after his shoe-horning into that latter film, this left only Maguire’s strutting Parker to be given the MCU quality-control treatment. It too works, on a different level. Their collective chemistry works, and will likely work upon looking back. Garfield plays wounded well, and to see the pain in the eyes of his Peter is to have a conversation, as an audience, with the actor about what he went through with his Webb films, both textually and meta-textually. That alone would have been brilliant enough, and, as such, has initiated a desire in the audience for more. Perhaps Tom Hardy’s character might exist in the same universe as Garfield-Spidey?

Anyway: Will these bits age well? There is a good chance not! The fact that actors deliver and that we believe them will never not age well, and so the movie may not actually need this extra-text nostalgia bump to be effective in the long run. But it might. Maguire’s Peter functions ultimately at face-value. He’s got a bad back, he’s the oldest, and he slips quickly into a mentor role and we buy it, and we don’t need a previous relationship with this character for that to work. Garfield-Spidey saving MJ? This need not be explained to a modern audience who gets the reference, but does it still work with just the set-up of the character mentioning Gwen once just a few scenes prior? I don’t know if it does. I hope it does, because I love it, but it might not.

Then there’s all the villains, which means only more talent, and more reasons for the movie to age well. Willem Dafoe’s scene-stealing, I’d argue, needs no study guide to get. He comes through and is playing a character explained well by the film. The fact that the other bad guys (with the theoretical exception of Alfred Molina’s Otto Octavius) do not get as painstaking a rendering as the Green Goblin is a gift to the film. They do cool superpowered stuff, and are bad, but Holland-Peter still has empathy for them. This is all the audience needs to know for their inclusion and elevation to work. Willem Dafoe chewing-scenery is the same in every language.

In the end, time will do what it always does and unmercifully bare truth. Maybe in fifty years, movies featuring an amnesiac Gwyneth Paltrow will go down as the best movies ever made actually, making Homecoming the crowning achievement of this Spider-era. And movies that tickle the nostalgia-bone will be looked down on as the navel-gazing of a population facing down various forms of apocalypse—like going through old photo albums while cleaning out a childhood home on the verge of demolition. Bearing this in mind, I think No Way Home will still be considered, full stop, the best of these first three Holland-starring films. It stays in his home town, it’s in conversation with its source material, and it’s stacked with an awards-caliber cast that makes its fantasies believable. In the end, if your script is being fundamentally honest with itself, a human face will be able to sell it, and its context’s import will diminish, as will the piece’s reliance on it.

Whether those fantasies are of a world where a multi-verse can be tampered with by a wizard who’s old enough to know better, or of a world where past artistic highs and lows matter as much as what’s happening in the moment, sprinkle a teary-eyed Tom Holland on top of your make-believe and human beings will recognize themselves in that work, helping it to age well, as the truth always does.

1 note · View note

lokiondisneyplus · 3 years

Text

[This interview contains spoilers for Loki episode five.]

In a recent conversation with THR, Grant also discusses Classic Loki’s ultimate sacrifice and what the character was thinking as he laughed en route to his death.

You’ve said that you and Tom Hiddleston have wanted to work together for years. When did this desire first come about?

And in terms of the script, what was your first impression of Classic Loki’s full-fledged arc?

As he was laughing in the face of the beast, what was on his mind?

Since Tom has played Loki for many years, he’s become the world’s foremost authority on the character, so much so that he delivers actual lectures on him.

He is! He’s Lokipedia.

Was there enough time for him to give you a crash course on the character?

Between Allegiant General Pryde in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Classic Loki, were these two of your favorite costume fittings to date?

No, I never met Ian on it at all.

Between Jack Hock (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and Withnail (Withnail and I), who would enjoy Loki’s company the most? Who’d make for a more ideal companion?

#Richard E. Grant #Classic Loki #interview

38 notes · View notes

weekendwarriorblog · 3 years

Text

The Weekend Warrior 7/9/21 - BLACK WIDOW, SUMMERTIME, THE LONELIEST WHALE and More

Well, well... It certainly looks like I’ve been given a bit of a “bye week” to recuperate and recover from all the insanity of June, huh? The 4th of July weekend saw a nice boon for Universal Pictures with the top 3, although The Boss Baby: Family Business ended up doing better than The Forever Purge despite the former also being on Peacock. But neither of them really got great reviews, so I’m not sure either of them will have much impact on this week’s big release…

BLACK WIDOW (Marvel Studios/Disney)!

Yes, after nearly two years, Marvel Studios is back in theaters with the long-awaited solo movie for Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, who has appeared in the movies going back to Iron Man 2, also played a key role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as well as three of the Avengers movies. The Black Widow movie goes back in time to after the events of Captain America: Civil War and before (SPOILER!) Romanoff was killed in Avengers: Infinity War. This one reunites her with her family including Florence Pugh as her sister Yelena, as the two of them want to take down the Red Room where they were trained to be killers. It also stars David Harbour as the Red Guardian and Rachel Weisz as their maternal figure, and honestly, you probably don’t even need that much to know that you probably already want to see it, because IT’S MARVEL!

It’s actually hard to believe that Black Widow is Marvel’s first theatrical release since 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, and obviously, that wasn’t supposed to be how things went. Marvel’s original release date for the movie was kicking off the summer of 2020, but when COVID hit and theaters were closed, it was delayed, first until the end of the year and then until the summer of 2021. It must have been difficult because Marvel had already planned a series of television series that led into the movies, including Wandavision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the currently-airing Loki.

Marvel’s first theatrical release in two years currently has a relatively decent 82% on Rotten Tomatoes, which for comparison’s sake is a better rating than Captain Marvel and Avengers: Age of Ultron, but that’s about it. I mean, at least it’s not stinking up Marvel’s track record like Iron Fist and The Inhumans did, so there’s that. I’ve already reviewed the movie, so you can read what I thought about it here.

More important than any other factor, there’s the Disney+ in the room, because Disney decided to offer Black Widow for a Premium on its streaming service this Friday, basically for $30, which I’m not sure if that’s for a certain amount of time or to own (which would make more sense). That’s a pretty sweet deal if you have a family and a nice home theater, because taking them all to the movies might cost $100 or more with concessions, etc. But for a lot of people, it’s long past time to get back to theaters, and despite the success of the Disney+ shows, many will want to see this on the big screen. At least that’s my theory, and I’m gonna stick with it until I’m proven wrong when numbers come in on Friday or Saturday.

It’s very hard to determine how many of the millions of people who went to see Avengers: Endgame over two years ago are ready to get back into theaters, but one benefit that Black Widow has over other upcoming Marvel movies (okay, well, Shang-Chi) is that Johansson’s character is a known commodity from previous movies, which certainly could have helped Tom Holland’s solo Spider-Man movies, although you would think that Spider-Man: Far from Home would have opened bigger following Endgame. To be fair, the Spider-Man movies were opening with over $100 million WELL before the MCU, showing the popularity of the character, although we also could see a bump with the second Captain America and Thor movies after their appearance in 2012’s The Avengers. Oddly, 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp didn’t see nearly as big an opening bump following Avengers: Infinity War from the first movie, but Ant-Man hadn’t been as big a player as Natasha/Black Widow. Oddly, the Spider-Man and Ant-Man movies have something in common -- they both opened in July vs. May.

The other factor, of course, is COVID and whether a movie can open even bigger than the $70 million opening weekend of F9, currently the biggest post-pandemic opener. If anything is going to do it, then it’s going to be a Marvel movie, especially one that should be as big a draw for women as for men. No, we don’t subscribe to the myth that female-led action movies don’t do as well as males ones. The MCU is all about the characters and the universe, and those factors should help Black Widow should be good for somewhere around $80 to 85 million over the weekend, which will make it the new barometer for the post-pandemic. (Incidentally, this is only about $11 million less than my original prediction from last March, and that didn’t have the COVID or streaming factor in play.)

Hey, you know what I haven’t done in a long time but probably should resume?

MY TOP 10 BOX OFFICE PREDICTIONS!

1. Black Widow (Marvel/Disney) - $84.3 million N/A

2. F9 (Universal) - $9.6 million -58%

3. The Boss Baby: Family Business (Universal/DreamWorks Animation) - $9 million -45%

4. The Forever Purge (Universal) - $5.7 million -54%

5. A Quiet Place Part II (Paramount) - $2.2 million -45%

6. The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard (Lionsgate) - $1.4 million -55%

7. Cruella (Disney) - $1.3 million -47%

8. Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway (Sony) - $1.2 million -42%

9. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (New Line/WB) - $600k -57%

10. In the Heights (New Line/WB) - $550k -43%

Although one can expect big drops all around, this should be another weekend where the top 10 domestic grosses $100 million, but that’s kind of a given with Black Widow likely to make much of that itself.

I guess this week’s “Chosen One” is SUMMERTIME (Good Deed Entertainment), directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada (Blindspotting, Raya and the Last Dragon), which is a pseudo-doc, pseudo-narrative that follows 27 Angelino poets in a typical day in Los Angeles. I’m not really a poetry or spoken word fan so much, but the way that these talented poets are showcased, each in their own compelling segment. While having some kind of interconnecting story might not have been necessary, it’s actually what keeps you invested as you go from one situation and style of poetry onto the next. You can tell that there are some real stars of the future in this that will likely appear elsewhere. There are just so many great numbers from Tyris Winter complaining abut the price of food at a restaurant, Mila Cuda expressing her sexuality on the bus to an obvious homophobe, a couple at a marriage counselor relaying their issues through song and rap, an amazing dance number, and so much more. My favorite running storyline was the one involving street rappers Anewbys (Bryce Banks) and Rah (Austin Antoine), who are trying to make it. The incidental music is great, and the performances are embellished with cinema verité style shots of L.A. that really helps enhance the mood and set the environment for the story being told. It’s hard to call Summertime a musical, but there’s so much great rhymes and music that it just has a great youthful energy that seems so perfect for this time of the year.

You can read my interview with Estrada over at Below the Line later today.

Streaming now on Disney+ is the first episode of the new Pixar series Monsters at Work, based on the characters from one of my favorite Pixar movies, Monsters Inc., with new episodes airing every Wednesday.

Joshua (Cropsy) Zeman’s doc THE LONELIEST WHALE: THE SEARCH FOR 52 (Bleecker Street), exec. produced by Leonardo DiCaprio hits theaters on Friday and then will be on digital July 16. Oddly, it’s the second movie in the last month about whales. This one is about the search for the 52 Hertz Whale that was discovered in 1989 and has become a global sensation as it lives in solitude, emitting a different frequency from other whales and therefore unable to communicate.

I have to admit that I was quite cynical about this movie, mainly because it looked like it could potentially be boring, as we watch and listen to a bunch of oceanographers talking about whales, and I was mostly right. Zeman himself is not the most interesting subject or narrator for his own doc, so that doesn’t help much either. Essentially, the entire movie is this group of rag-tag oceanographers (as well as a musician who plays clarinet with the whales -- yeah, he should be thrown overboard first, I’m thinking) looking for this elusive whale that no one has seen since 1989. As you can imagine, it’s a fairly fruitless expedition that makes you miss the excitement of Ron Howard’s whale movie, but if you’re just watching this to see beautiful whales in their natural habitat, the movie does deliver. I’m sure the less cynical than myself will find more interesting aspects of the film to enjoy, and yes, this is a far superior film to the recent Fathom, but it also shares lots of potentially interesting facts about whales and their history, which doesn’t make it a complete loss.

I have to imagine that The Loneliest Whale should be appreciated as a fine nature doc if you’re into this sort of thing, but if you’re looking for something particularly groundbreaking or moving, you’ll have to search elsewhere.

Judd Ehrlich’s doc THE PRICE OF FREEDOM (Tribeca Studios) takes on the gun debate and how the National Rifle Association has divided the nation and cost countless lives along the way. The movie features the likes of President Bill Clinton, activist (and Parkland survivor) X Gonzalez, Senator Chris Murphy, Representatives Jason Crow and Lucy McBath, and many more on both sides of the gun debate.

Also opening on Friday in theaters and virtual cinema is the Tunisian horror film DACHRA (Dekanalog), written and directed by Abdelhamid Bouchnak, which follows three journalism students as they investigate a cold case which takes them deep into the woods.

Netflix launched its “Fear Street” franchise last week based on the book series by R.L. Stine, and this week, the second movie, FEAR STREET PART 2: 1978 (Netflix), debuts on the streamer. I’ve actually seen Fear Street Part 1: 1994, and it’s a fun little slasher set in the town of Shadyside, the “Killer Capitol of the USA.” I honestly had no idea these were Rated R, since I thought it was more of a young adult type thing, but it’s really straight-up Wes Craven Scream. I might have to check out some of these books, but the first movie was quite enjoyable even if they generally seem derivative of other slashers.

Also, Eytan Fox’s Sublet, which has been playing in select theaters will now be available to Watch At Home via Apple TV, Prime Video, Vudu, FandangoNOW, Google Play, YouTube and DIRECTV. Also, Ivan Kavanagh’s horror film, Son, will be on Shudder this Thursday so if you missed it in theaters and VOD, now’s your chance to see it, and you can read my interview with Mr. Kavanagh over at Below the Line.

Oh, and TONIGHT at the Metrograph, as part of their Live Screening Series, they’ll be showing Rashaad Ernesto Green’s Gun Hill Road (2011) as part of their FIrst Film Series with the Green Brothers, which will be followed next week by the first film from his brother, Reinaldo Marcus Green.

And that, my friends, is it for this week! Next week, we have SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY from Warner Bros., and that’s about it! (Well, there will be a lot more limited releases, as well a Emmy nominations, so back to the grind!)

#The Weekend Warrior #Movies #Reviews #BlackWidow #Black Widow #BOx Office #Summertime

0 notes

curiousartemis · 6 years

Text

Infinity War Review!!!

STEVE: So of course I start with my favorite character in the entire MCU franchise. Now Steve didn’t play a very big part, but it’s impressive that he tended to quietly and majestically dominate every scene he was in (okay I might be a bit biased, but there is a nobility to the character and Chris Evans is a genius). We saw Cap stick to his principles when he didn’t allow Vision to sacrifice himself, and ladies and gentlemen, that is why I love this character with all my heart and soul. Some may call him cheesy, but to me he is an inspiration. Steve is the person I want to be. Strength in the face of almost certain defeat, he never loses sight of what’s right and what isn’t right, and he will fight until the very last breath in his body to protect the people he loves.

BUCKY: Okay, sorry, yes I know he’s a very minor character in this movie but you expect me to talk about Steve and not mention Bucky immediately afterward?! So first, his interactions with Steve. Is this #stucky fan happy?! YES THEY ARE. That hug was so tender, so warm, and I had the biggest damn smile on my face. Right, I’m not mental or anything so I know there’s no romance there, but nevertheless, the love and warmth these two characters have for one another spans decades, and it is just really, really sweet. Which is why the moment Steve kneels down and touches the earth where Bucky once stood just broke my heart. Think about what he’s been through to save his dearest friend. And just like that, he had to watch him disintegrate before his very eyes. MY HEART. There were actually a surprising number of great Bucky moments, considering how little he was in the film. His first scene was heartbreaking, as when he realized T’Challa was bringing him the metal arm, his first question was, “Where’s the fight?” The bleakness in his eyes and his voice was painful. The man has been a tool, and now, even amongst friends and allies, he’s a tool again. His interactions with Rocket were hilarious. The withering look he gives Rocket when Rocket asks about his arm was classic. And they fought together! It was great.

TONY: Okay, you’re as surprised as I am that Tony is third on this list. I like Tony a lot but he’s never been a favorite. NO MORE. His true heart came out in this movie, not that it hasn’t been there before (Tony and Steve have had the greatest growth in the MCU, and Tony is hardly the selfish playboy he was in the first Iron Man). The dream he told Pepper he had was sweet, but I love how she doesn’t put up with his shit. But it was Tony’s relationship with Peter Parker that really did it for me. When he held Peter in his arms and Peter was “dying” (we all know the kid ain’t really dead), my heart just broke. Really, Tony stole this movie. Massive kudos to RDJ.

PETER PARKER: Well he’s as cute as he’s been in the other two movies, so no surprises here. The kid consistently delivers in every scene he’s in. He’s innocent, sweet, and brave. Just a precious little munchkin.

PETER QUILL: He’s never been a favorite of mine, and I don’t really have much to say. I think the Russo Brothers had trouble writing for him. Some of his lines fell a bit flat, but Chris Pratt did his best. The character was consistent.

GAMORA: Another who’s never really been a favorite, though I’ve got nothing against her. Guys, I think Gamora might be really dead. That scene when her “dad” took her by the hand and pulled her towards the cliff… my heart just broke. Then we see her crumpled body at the bottom of the cliff. I know the Time Stone is a thing, but, still. We’ll have to see.

NEBULA: So happy to see the return of this boss bitch, yeah! My baddest robo babe was at it again. She mostly just fought a lot, and displayed some touching (angry) concern for her sister’s well-being. Their relationship touches my heart. Crazy that only she and Tony are left on that planet. Oh, and Strange.

STRANGE: He’s an interesting character, and I think Cumberbatch does a great job playing him, but the character just doesn’t seem to fit into the universe. He’s a very cold person, so we know he didn’t save Tony out of compassion. That doesn’t mean he’s a BAD person; obviously, he is doing his best to save the universe. But yeah, I don’t have much more to say about him.

DRACK, MANTIS, ROCKET, AND GROOT: I’m grouping them together for obvious reasons. More hilarious one-liners from Drack. Mantis is still really sweet. Rocket and Groot are hilarious. Thumbs up.

THOR: So Thor’s definitely another scene-stealer. (Maybe that’s why it was really weird when he and Cap shared a scene together for a few seconds. It was like… the universe broke a little.) Again, excellent consistency of character. Thor has a very commanding personality, and he’s stubborn, and he believes in himself. So when he decided he was going to go make himself a weapon, then damn it, that is what he was going to do, and no one could stop him. And turns out he was right! That weapon literally saved the day. (Or as much as it could.) As usual, I love how polite and kind he is, and Hemsworth just chews that roll up. Oh my, his grief for his brother, and his entire family, in that scene with Rocket, was heartbreaking. Good job, Hemsworth!

LOKI: He wasn’t in it for much, but again… I think he may be dead! NOOOO! I didn’t know how much I loved Loki until I lost him. In the end, he sacrificed himself for his brother. That was amazing to see. Even though he probably shouldn’t have given the Stone up to save Thor’s life… as Cap says, we don’t trade lives.

VISION AND WANDA: So, there’s just something a bit cold about these two. The actors are great, but I wasn’t feeling it. I was not sad at all when Vision died. And I need to see more from Wanda. I don’t really know her, even after all this time. Hmm.

NATASHA AND OKOYE: A pair of bad ass babes who, not surprisingly, have a couple fight scenes together. They’re both still great. Nothing more to say here.

T’CHALLA: The King didn’t have much to do here, other than to look bad ass and command his army. But he looked great doing it. Again, not much to say here. (Also my fingers are kinda getting tired at this point, haha.)

Who am I forgetting…?

BRUCE: This was a surprisingly good showing for Bruce Banner! For whatever the reason, the Hulk is refusing to come out. So Bruce had to finally stick up for himself, and the Hulkbuster armor allowed him to do that. I really feel like this character is blossoming a bit, or at least being allowed to grow as a character. He’s sort of picked up where he left off in Thor: Ragnarok. He’s sweet, curious, and maybe has some self-confidence issues. His interactions with Shuri were cute, though brief. Oh, and Shuri wasn’t in here much, so I won’t list her. Though she was ADORABLE as usual.

I’m still probably forgetting someone, but overall, everyone was great. Everyone! Thanos is a bad guy, so I won’t list him lol but he was also surprisingly well written (and well-acted, too). I feel I actually got to know this character a bit instead of him just being the Evil Villain. Heimdall’s death was bullshit, though I kind of knew he’d bite it. Also? Where is Valkyrie?! I’m sure they’ll explain her away in the next Thor movie; I doubt she died with all the other Asgardians.

PREDICTIONS:

The obvious one is that Captain Marvel will appear in the next film. I want to feel excited about this character because, yay, female superhero, right? But somehow I’m not too enthused. Not sure why.

Our Heroes will use the Time Stone to bring everyone back to life, including Loki, Heimdall, and Gamora. The only one who might not make it is Vision. (Yes, I changed my mind on this midway through typing haha.)

Tony Stark will retire. The conversation with Pepper seemed to really hint at that. And, god willing, they will let him retire instead of killing him.

Steve Rogers will not die. I don’t know why I feel this, but I do. I think the character is too beloved. People would fucking riot. No one wants Cap to die. Will he continue to star in MCU films, no. I’m pretty sure the actor is done. And that’s fine. Let Steve retire. If he DOES die, it will be a massive heroic sacrifice, and it will not be gory or disturbing… it’ll be like walking into a brilliant light and disintegrating or something. That’s the only way they could do it. You can’t have Steve Rogers’ lifeless body just lying around. You just can’t.

Bucky or Sam will not become the new Captain America. Just because Sebastian Stan signed on for six (five now?) films doesn’t mean he’s becoming Captain America. It just means that if the studio wants him, the actor has agreed to appear. The only way it could possibly happen is if, before he dies, Steve asks Bucky to do it. Then, maybe, it could happen.

And that’s all I got for now. I’m gonna go rewatch it as soon as I can. It was good, like, really good. They handled the huge cast very well. You didn’t even feel like there were THAT many people, and you didn’t feel like anyone got the short end of the stick.

#infinity war #infinity war spoilers

2 notes · View notes

bunny-wan-kenobi · 6 years

Text

Bunny Fic Recs: The Top Ten Strikes Back!

My friends think my fanfic-reading habits are hilarious and bizarre--and I tend to agree. I read stories in very distinct and obsessive phases, like if I’m in a Star Trek phase I literally cannot bring myself to read a story from a different fandom. Can’t do it--that’s just how it is. My fic-craving phases (there’s no way to put this that won’t make it sound like a drug habit) can be as short as 2 weeks (sorry @ginny-of-course) and as long as 5 months (aka my last Star Wars phase).

This means any fic rec summary will reflect my fandom phases of that year, which is kind of a fun way to see all the twists and turns my journey took me and the characters I discovered (and rediscovered). So, in no particular order, here’s the top ten fanfics I read this year!

1. Bargaining by proantagonist (Thor): Faced with an eternity without his brother, Loki strikes a bargain to change the past. Post TDW. (Complete)

This story is AMAZING. Not only does it contain some of the best characterizations of Thor, Loki, and Odin that I’ve read, it deftly examines their relationships in all their complexity and contradictions. The relationship between Thor and Loki is captured beautifully and simultaneously heartwarming and tragic. The way Loki grows over time and learns trial by trial is especially rewarding so that every big choice he makes had me fist-pumping in pride because the story builds up these twists so well. Every single detail matters, and this story gave me so many things I never knew I wanted from a Thor story. I thought I had the fic figured out, and then the ending completely shocked me in the best possible way. I cried so many times reading this story, and its insight into Loki’s headspace and the dysfunction of family relationships is remarkable.

2. too wise to peaceable woo by theMightyPen (LOTR): Most marriages in Gondor are matters of convenience, especially among the nobility. But Dol Amroth is a different sort of place, with a different sort of royal family. Sometimes, Lothiriel is not convinced this is a good thing.(or, how in Middle Earth the too southern, too dark, too outspoken daughter of Imrahil ended up married to Éomer, son of Éomund) (WIP)

I could write an essay about everything I love about this story. Not only does it make a compelling, lovable heroine out of a character I had not given much to previously (Lothiriel), but it tackles race, class, and inter-cultural issues in Middle Earth with incredible nuance and emotional depth. The slow-burn love story at its center is developed organically and complements the exploration of family and friend relationships and world-building for Rohan culture. I appreciate so many intentional elements--like the friendship between Eowyn and Lothiriel, the complex politics of countries still recovering from war, and a woman of color coming into her own as a leader. The Rohan the author paints is a breathing place vivid in detail, and even the OCs are easy to love and root for. A truly wonderful love story woven into an intricate cultural landscape, this fic puts me on the edge of my seat waiting for updates.

3. The Gentlest Schism by SanwichesYumYum (GOT): Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth. The war is over. Some of them hadn’t thought that they would outlive it. And yet... (WIP but ends at a satisfactory point)

This is a rare story that goes against your expectations and makes you linger in the disappointments and losses along with the characters. The premise is heartbreaking, and becomes even more tragic as you keep reading, but at the same time, it’s a beautiful testament to the resilience of love and the importance of family. I love the community the author cultivates on Tarth, the unexpected characters they weave in, and how this little island becomes an entire functional and complex world of its own. The second half of the fic gets a little repetitive occasionally and there is some explicit content, but it’s a really compelling read and one of my favorite Jaime/Brienne stories.

4. The Days and Steps series by CatKing_Catkin (Thor): Even after everything, Thor holds out hope that his brother can be redeemed. Now that he's away from the Chitauri, his mind is fully his own again. Not that he's home, even as a prisoner, maybe he can start to remember what it's like to have a family and a place to belong. Maybe he can even come to truly understand the other worlds as something other than a conqueror. (Complete)

After reading the last story in this series, I wept like a baby. These stories trace Loki’s excruciatingly slow healing process in such a realistic and moving way that the ending feels so, so earned. Again, it’s the family dynamics that shine here, in particular, a family actually processing and dealing with the ways they’ve hurt each other and the mistakes they’ve made. The realizations strike deep and the characterizations are rich so you become fully invested in this family’s journey.

5. Captains and Pawns by sian22 (LOTR): "The board is set and the pieces are moving." So Gandalf said, but what unseen hand made them move? How far back did the game start and with what unexpected results? The Lords of Gondor and Rohan find Saruman will use them for his own end and both the Steward's sons and Rohan's Prince and Lady must find their way. A tale from Faramir's birth until the fateful kiss. (Complete)

If you’re a Faramir fan, this story is for you. It’s a fascinating character-driven story that fleshes out a lot of the subtext in the events before and during the War of the Ring. It moves the narrative from Gondor to Rohan and we follow Faramir, Eowyn, and Eomer from childhood to adulthood, reminding us of the cost of war and also deepening your love for these characters.

6. Ad Infinitum by Stormontheocean (Dragon Age): After a bus accident, Liz wakes up in Haven, stuck in the fictional world of Dragon Age. How does a modern girl get by when she can't speak the language, and her expansive knowledge of the Blight and Kirkwall, but limited knowledge of Inquisition would only make her look more suspicious? Fake being deaf and mute, and hope not to get caught before she can find proof of her origin. But the best laid plans never work out as expected... (WIP)

Okay, I’m usually wary of self-insert fics, but this one put ALL my doubts to rest. It works. It really does, and it manages to make the OC main character (the stumbling block of many a writer) a completely three-dimensional and lovable addition to an existing universe. The first big plot turn of the story made me so unbelievably gleeful and excited that I won’t spoil it here but let me say--the story does not turn out in the way you expect. Even the slow-burn romance is believably developed, and this story cemented my love for Bull’s Chargers. A stand-out AU fic that is just plain enjoyable to read.

7. Jacob and Esau Say Their Goodbyes by LadyCharity (Thor): After Svartalfheim, Loki is still alive. In the end, it changes nothing.In which Thor hurts, Loki loves, and Jane learns how to lie. (Complete)

Let me emphasize that this was a near-impossible choice to make. I love every single one of LadyCharity’s Thor fics, but I decided to go with the one I think excels at every level. It’s emotionally devastating, poignant, and with brilliant characterization. I appreciate how succinct, poetic, and introspective the author’s prose is, and she just gets these characters and their relationships. Shout-out for her great development for Jane as well, who all too often gets overlooked in fanfic.

8. A Wreath of Thorns by LadyNormaOfTheWesterlands (GOT): In the aftermath of the Battle of the Bastards and the destruction of the Great Sept in King's Landing, new allegiances are forged and family ties will be tested, as two Queens dance around a blood-dripping throne and a new King rises in the North. The day of reckoning is getting closer, for princes and commoners, for friend and foe, while cold winds bring the longest of winters, and, with it, an enemy who doesn't respond to honour, nor love. Post-Season 6. (WIP)

There’s a lot to love in this understated story, which captures the POV of multiple GOT characters as events hurtle towards an inevitable culmination. It’s an introspective story, almost meditative in nature, and everyone is perfectly IC. It’s tragic, inspiring, and ultimately a great tribute to these characters.

9. The Native by StarTrekFanWriter (Star Trek): The relationship that started it all - Sarek/Amanda. How a logical guy like Sarek fell for a human, and why he would defy his people to marry her. Sybock & Spock will be featured. (Complete)

The beginning of 2017 was my introduction to Sarek/Amanda fic, and this was one of the standouts. I’m a sucker for stories that navigate the cultural differences, tensions, and development of interracial relationships, and this one does a great job immersing you in Vulcan culture. Amanda is also a really wonderful character, strong, empathetic, intelligent and you can definitely see why she and Sarek are so well-matched.

10. The Abduction of Eomer, King of Rohan and House of Sun by Lialathuveri (LOTR) (Complete)

Okay I kinda cheated here but I honestly could not choose between these. I like them for completely different reasons: The first fic is a hilarious series of misadventures that bring Lothiriel and Eomer together and the second is a much more serious development of a love story after an arranged marriage. The world-building in both stories is well-realized, and Lothiriel is simply a delightful character that I will read in ANY iteration.

More Bunny Fic Recs:

My Top 10

The Next Top 10

Game of Thrones

Merlin

Makorra

LOTR/The Hobbit

Captain Swan

Star Wars: Romance One-shots

Star Wars: Gen One-shots

Star Wars: PT Multi-Chapter Fics

Star Wars: OT Multi-Chapter Fics

#fic recs #thor #loki #got #lord of the rings #dragon age #jaime x brienne #star trek #bunny posts

4 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 3 years

Text

Marvel’s Loki Season 2: The MCU Questions We Need Answered

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

The following contains Loki spoilers.

Marvel’s Loki may have only been six episodes, but it was a wild ride from start to finish, reinventing a fan favorite character, wrestling with complex existential questions of free will and fate, and telling one of the franchise’s weirdest love stories to date. Plus, you know, it also managed to entirely rewrite the reality of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it.

Thankfully, Marvel wasted no time confirming a second season, announcing the show’s renewal in the end credits of the Season 1 finale. (Likely because it was obvious that fans would riot if we weren’t promised some answers to the many questions – both literal and philosophical – that this show raised.)

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Here are just a few of the things we’re definitely going to need Loki Season 2 to explore.

Where in the Timeline is Loki?

The first season of Loki ends with a jaw-dropping cliffhanger: He Who Remains is dead, the multiverse is reborn, and when Loki returns to the Time Variance Authority he doesn’t find things exactly as he left them. Mobius and B-20 no longer remember him and the three giant statues of the Time Keepers at the TVA have been replaced with a single figure carved in Kang’s image. What in the world is going on here?

One of the first key questions Loki Season 2 will have to answer is precisely where and when this Loki and the TVA even are. Is this the remnants of the Sacred Timeline, rewritten into something new by He Who Remains’ death? Did Renslayer’s actions somehow change the TVA? Or did Sylvie’s temp-pad launch Loki across the multiverse into another world entirely? (Though since the TVA is supposed to exist outside of time and reality, could there even be a second one?)

Thinking too hard about this is enough to make your head hurt, in the best way possible.

What’s Next for Sylvie?

When last we saw our favorite female Loki variant Sylvie, she was watching time fracture around her after killing the man she’d spent her entire life trying to find and punish. Where does she possibly go after that? She’s literally changed reality – both for herself and everyone else.

Throughout the series, we’ve seen Sylvie driven by an aggressive single-mindedness. But where does she turn that focus now? Will she try and build the home she’s never been able to have before in one of the new timelines she’s created? Track Loki down in whatever timeline she’s sent him to? Or does she begin seeking out the Kang variants, trying to prove that her decision to essentially create them all doesn’t have to doom the universe the way He Who Remains predicted?

Is Sylvie and Loki’s Romance Doomed?

The season ended with Marvel’s most bizarre romance having their first relationship spat. Of course, for Loki and Sylvie that means literally fighting each other with swords while debating whether the universe deserves free will, all before one kisses and then betrays the other by shoving them through a temporal gateway. Shakespeare says the course of true love did never run smooth, guys.

What’s next for these two crazy kids is anyone’s guess – as far as we know, Sylvie’s currently still in the castle at the end of time, and Loki’s in…well, Loki’s in a timeline that we haven’t entirely identified yet. How they’ll find their way back to one another in season 2 (because of course they will find their way back to one another in season 2) is anyone’s guess.

Will Sylvie realize her decision to kill He Who Remains was a mistake? Will she regret kicking off what may well be another multiversal war and seek Loki out to try and fix what she broke? Will Loki try to find her again, in the wake of all that’s happened?

What About All Those Other Versions of Kang?

According to He Who Remains, Sylvie’s choice to kill him would essentially release a veritable army of Kang variants across the multiverse, who will wreak untold havoc and destruction until one essentially takes over again. And that appears to be exactly what has happened, to some extent, given that the statues of the Time Keepers at TVA headquarters have been replaced with a giant Kang figure. But which version of the character that is – or what the other, less benevolent version have done in his name – is up in the air.

We know that Jonathan Majors is set to play Kang the Conquerer in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania but that film isn’t set to hit theaters until 2023 and that’s an awfully long time to let the MCU’s new Big Bad sit idle. So it seems safe to assume that we’ll see some version of him pop up in at least one MCU property before then, if not more.

Where Did Judge Renslayer Go?

When last we saw Judge Renslayer, she seemed determined to prove that her life as a leader of the TVA – and the many morally dubious decisions she made as such – had some sort of meaning, despite the fact that her actions were essentially all performed in service to a group of leaders who didn’t actually exist.

After an emotional confrontation with Mobius, Renslayer escapes in search of “free will,” which as we know in this universe generally means Kang. Whether she finds him, or what happens during her confrontation with whichever version of Kang she meets is unknown, but since Renslayer is Kang’s girlfriend in the comics, it seems safe to assume that she has some hand in the creation of whatever version of the TVA Loki stumbles back into at the end of the finale.

Why Does the TVA Still Exist?

Throughout Loki Season 1, the TVA was sort of the literal embodiment of the “you had one job” concept. They were meant to patrol and protect the Sacred Timeline, pruning rogue variants and cutting off dangerous branches before they threatened the balance of reality. But now that He Who Remains is dead and there is no Sacred Timeline anymore, then what purpose does the TVA still serve in this new reality?

Judging by the giant statue of some version of Kang in the lobby, there’s every likelihood that the organization has shifted focus to either battle or track the many variants of the former He Who Remains throughout time and space and may have even been created in this reality by one the the “good” Kang variants. But, it’s also possible that the TVA is still trying, in some small way, to corral or at least organize the multiverse into something where its many branches can somehow peacefully co-exist.

What’s the Deal with Miss Minutes?

Miss Minutes, the TVA’s cheerful sentient clip art, is one of the most memorable parts of Loki’s first season. Her organizational prowess is clearly unmatched and very little appears to ruffle her determinedly perky attitude. But we still don’t know much about her, including how she came to exist or what her ultimate goals are.

Simultaneously helpful and vaguely menacing, it seems clear that she had an agenda of her own throughout the season. But an agenda in service to whom? He Who Remains? Kang the Conqueror? The larger concept of order? And what sort of secrets does she still know?

Is Alligator Loki Okay?

Obviously, a real concern going into Loki Season 2 is the fate of all the other Loki variants we met throughout the season. With He Who Remains dead and the multiverse unleashed, will the other Lokis be able to leave their Void prison and return to their real lives?

Most importantly, is Alligator Loki okay? Are he and Kid Loki striking out on their own now, perhaps to a Disney+ Young Avengers series near you? Loki Season 2 definitely needs to provide us with an update on our favorite reptilian god.

Could Classic Loki Still Be Alive?

As long as we’re talking about Loki variants, does the rebirth of the multiverse mean that Classic Loki might return in some way? Your mileage may vary on whether or not you think his sacrifice was truly heroic or a heroic piece of misdirection, but we don’t actually know what happens to the variants and timelines gobbled up by Alioth.

Sure, the other Lokis hinted that to be eaten by the fog monster equals instant death, but this show also spent four full episodes pretending that pruning equals being killed, so trust but verify, is all I’m saying. Plus, Richard E. Grant is just too good an actor not to put back in a classic Loki costume as soon as possible.

How Will Doctor Strange 2 Impact Loki Season 2?

With reports swirling that Tom Hiddleston will make some sort of appearance in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, it seems likely that the film will impact Loki Season 2 in significant ways.

Of course, the question of which version of Hiddleston’s Loki we might see in the film – the same one we saw in Loki or some other perhaps as-yet-unknown variant – remains an open one, but given that this Loki had a direct hand in the creation of the multiverse, it certainly makes sense that he might cross over to a film dealing directly with that concept. Could Sylvie also pop up? It’s certainly possible and after Loki and WandaVision it seems as though anything could happen in this film.

The post Marvel’s Loki Season 2: The MCU Questions We Need Answered appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2UhDRmU

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

0 notes