“No resurrections this time,” Thanos said after choking the life out of Loki in Avengers: Infinity War. While many fans took that line as a promise to audiences that the studio wasn’t going to pull yet another Loki fake-out, a lot of people still debated on whether or not the trickster’s death was legit.
Well, with Avengers: Endgame now out in theaters, we can tell you that it was. But does that mean we’ll never see the God of Mischief up on the big screen again? Maybe, but there is still a way that Loki could return for future MCU movies, and here’s how.
If you’ll recall, while interfering with the events of The Avengers in a bid to get the Space and Mind Stone, Iron Man and Ant-Man accidentally cause the Loki from 2012 to escape with the Tesseract. Given that we don’t get to see him again for the rest of the movie, the scene seems to tease that the God of Mischief is effectively alive again after his sacrifice in IW.
Now, it’s important to note that given how time travel works in the MCU, this isn’t exactly the case. Yes, Loki is alive, but he’s only alive in a splintered timeline, one which is hugely different to the one we’re used to and one where the events of The Dark World and Ragnarok surely don’t happen the same way.
This means that the Loki in this timeline would be very different to the one we’ve seen in recent MCU films and also, it’s unlikely that he could ever crossover into the main timeline. However, that being said, if Marvel are keen to continue his adventures in theaters, they could potentially produce a few films set in this splintered timeline and give us a look at not only what Loki’s been up to, but some of the other characters as well.
Then again, with the studio already working on a Disney Plus TV series for Tom Hiddleston’s fan favorite, we can’t imagine that they’d be in a rush to have him up on the big screen again so soon after Avengers: Endgame. But it’s nice to know that the possibility remains regardless.