Loki: Marvel Studios Misled Everyone With King Loki Shot

Loki‘s season 1 finale is now streaming on Disney+, finally allowing Marvel fans to see the full vision of Marvel Studios’ game-changing story arc. Now that Loki is done with season 1, fans are doing some deep-dives into how the series lived up to expectations and fan theories – and one thing that stands out is a major scene from Loki trailers that never actually happened in the show: the King Loki sequence. As you can see below, Marvel teased us with a shot of Tom Hiddleston dressed in full “King Loki” regalia, hinting that another pivotal Loki story arc from the comics could play out on the show:

So what happened to Loki‘s King Loki scene? It’s not really a hard question to answer, given the history of Marvel Studios misleading fans with fake teaser scenes.

As referenced in the tweet above, Marvel has included tantalizing teaser scenes that never appear in the movie for several of its projects. Spider-Man: Homecoming teased a Spider-Man and Iron Man team-up that never happened in the film (Tony saves Peter Parker multiple times, but they never fight together). Avengers: Infinity War took things even further will the first trailers and TV spots teasing a major slow-motion battle team shot that never happened. The Infinity War example was particularly fascinating as Marvel Studios and the Russo Bros. seemed to put a lot of footage and VFX work to create the sequence of Steve Rogers and co. charging into battle – and yet it was a moment that was never really possible in the way the Battle of Wakanda played out.

It’s still somewhat mysterious whether or not Marvel Studios produces these fake scenes as purposefully misleading promo material or simply re-purposes deleted scenes for marketing. Either way, it’s an effective promotional tool – just ask all the fans (and outlets) that spent time going down the rabbit hole of what “King Loki” could mean for the show (and the larger MCU). At the very least, the King Loki footage helped preserve the secret of who was waiting in the citadel at the end of time, in Loki‘s finale. After Episode 5 and its wild gang of Loki variants, a lot of fans actually expected King Loki to be the man behind the curtain; that lowered expectation has only allowed the real master of the citadel, He Who Remains, to make his grand debut…

Loki is now streaming on Disney+.