A 'Loki' Short Film Almost Had The God Of Mischief Running A Studio 54-Like Club In The 1970s
Loki is the latest Marvel series headed to Disney+, dropping Tom Hiddleston's God of Mischief into a time-hopping adventure. And this isn't the first time the folks at Marvel considered giving Hiddleston's Loki his own solo adventure. As Kevin Feige revealed during a press conference today, there was once a plan for a short film that would have Loki running a Studio 54-like club back in the '70s.
Are you ready for Loki? You better be, because the series premieres on Disney+ this week! Much of the show remains somewhat mysterious, as is the Marvel way (although early buzz has been mostly positive). But promotional materials play up the fact that Tom Hiddleston's Loki will be moving around through time. However, series creator Michael Waldron wants you to know they're not going to get lazy with that idea.
"People hear it's a show about Loki affecting historical events," Waldron revealed during a press conference. "I think everybody maybe expects, all right, that's gonna be Loki riding with Paul Revere. That's the lowest-hanging fruit version of that. So we wanted to subvert those expectations and go to places that maybe people knew but didn't know well and would just be exciting to see."
Club Loki
And during that same press conference, Marvel big cheese Kevin Feige revealed that once upon a time, before he got his own series, Loki almost appeared in his own short movie. "Early on, [the Loki series had], as Michael calls it, the low-hanging fruit," Feige said. "There were ideas, as Tom [Hiddleston] will remember, for a short film, going back almost a decade, for Loki in the '70s, running a Studio 54 in the '70s. I think we had some concept art of him on a horse. Thankfully, thanks to Michael and [director] Kate [Herron] the show became infinitely more interesting than that. The time periods are almost secondary to the story itself."
When the Marvel Cinematic Universe was just getting off the ground, Marvel produced a series of direct-to-video short films called Marvel One-Shots. The One-Shots featured characters in the MCU involved in scenarios outside of the main movies, and there's a good chance that if there had been a Loki short film almost a decade ago, it would've been produced as a One-Shot. But that didn't happen, and it's probably a good thing it didn't, because now Loki gets to lead his own TV series.
In addition to Hiddleston, Loki features Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sophia Di Martino, Wunmi Mosaku, and Richard E. Grant. Loki starts streaming on June 9, 2021, with new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.