‘What’s wrong with his face?’: Marvel’s latest marketing misfire makes Tom Hiddleston the new Brie Larson

While the relative quality of Marvel Studios’ movies and TV shows may go up and down, one thing you can always rely on the House of Ideas to provide is weird-looking posters. Be it the overcrowded, awkwardly photoshopped examples from the Spider-Man trilogy to the garish marketing monstrosities used for Quantumania, the MCU all too often provides some poorly conceived promotional material. We just had a recent royal screw-up with The Marvels and now the curse has struck again with Loki season 2.

To mark the imminent arrival of the Disney Plus show’s second run, whose premiere was just brought forward a day to Oct. 5, Marvel has dropped a new poster for it. On paper, the idea to go back to basics and simply highlight the titular Asgardian trickster on his lonesome is a smart one. However, in execution, it definitely has some issues. Those of you who get freaked out by waxwork dummies may wish to look away now…

Yes, with his overly airbrushed skin and eyes so glassy he could be wearing a pair of those annoyingly bright contact lenses everyone has in Ahsoka, there’s something distinctly uncanny about Tom Hiddleston in this poster. So much so that it’s all Marvel subredditors can think about.

I am sad to say that, no, he is 100% not a toy.

Now you can’t unsee it…

This is the second time in as many weeks that Marvel’s marketing has gone awry, following some cinema standees for The Marvels standees that seemed to suggest Brie Larson had been replaced by an entirely different actress in the sequel. Hiddleston isn’t quite so unrecognizable in his own poster snafu but this is hardly the best way to increase hype for his return. Unless it turns out that season 2 introduces some kind of Life Model Decoy Loki, in which case I take it all back.