Avengers: Endgame Fan Theory Explains How Loki Is Alive

YouTube channel Eman’s Movie Reviews has a pretty detailed theory about how Loki’s story played out following the events of Avengers: Endgame — and if he’s right, it could go a long way toward explaining what the status quo will be in the character’s upcoming Disney+ series. For obvious reasons, this story will feature spoilers for Avengers: Endgame, so you’ve been warned. In the film, some of the Avengers travel back in time, stealing the Tesseract from Marvel’s The Avengers. The Infinity Stone is dropped, and picked up by Loki — who at that point had already been defeated by the Avengers and was in custody. He uses it to teleport away.

From that point on, it is not exactly clear what happened. In-story, it is explained that removing an Infinity Stone from a universe will cause irreparable harm, leaving the universe defenseless against certain kinds of attacks and fundamentally changing reality itself. The desire to avoid creating a tangent reality is a big part of why, at the end of the film, the borrowed stones all have to be returned to the exact moment they were taken. From this perspective, it is likely that Loki created an alternate timeline by abscoding with the Stone, and that he may have left the timeline he abandoned in bad shape.

Eman, though, thinks that a character as ancient and clever as Loki would likely see the danger inherent in that, and would have done essentially what the Avengers did: used the stones to accomplish a specific end and then returned them to where he got them. The theory here says that he likely would have used a Naruto-style “shadow clone” of himself to send back with the Tesseract so that he could go on about his life unmolested while everyone believed him to be in custody. In this theory, it would be Loki’s double who appeared to die at the hands of the Dark Elves, and the real Loki who reemerged to take on Odin’s visage and rule Asgard. That gives him five years, from 2013 until 2018, to rule Asgard while having unlimited access to the Tesseract. That alone could serve as a pretty solid jumping-off point for his series.

The theory further holds that Loki would have done the same thing again in the moments before Thanos attacked in Avengers: Infinity War, faking his death to avoid the consequences for failing Thanos. The argument here is bolstered somewhat by Loki’s extremely feeble attempt to attack Thanos in Infinity War; in this case, he wanted people to believe him dead — especially Thanos — and so he might have essentially “thrown the fight.” This would allow him to re-emerge again now that Thanos is gone.

What do you think of this theory? Sound off in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter at @RussBurlingame. In the meantime, Avengers: Endgame is still in theaters and is around $75 million away from becoming the highest-grossing film of all time at the global box office. The next Marvel Studios movie, Spider-Man: Far From Home, will be in theaters next month. If you want to really get your superhero on, X-Men: Dark Phoenix hits theaters on Thursday.