WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.
Another day, another round of “What did the Avengers: Endgame writers or directors explain this time?” On Monday, it was Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus’ confirming a hugely popular fan theory about Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter. Today, it’s brothers Joe and Anthony Russo digging into what happened to actor Tom Hiddleston’s god of mischief Loki, who appeared briefly during the time-traveling Avengers’ trip to New York 2012. If you recall, he stole the Tesseract space stone and escaped.
Thor’s adopted brother was one of the first major characters to be killed off by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. The thing is, this felt a little weird since Marvel had all but confirmed by then that Hiddleston would be reviving the role for a Disney+ original series. So, how would that work? Well, thanks to Tony Stark and Scott Lang’s botched attempt to steal the space stone in Endgame, Loki managed to steal it and escape. At least, that’s what fans have been thinking, and the Russos seem to have confirmed it.
“Loki, when he teleports away with the [Space] Stone, would create his own timeline,” Joe told Business Insider. “It gets very complicated, but it would be impossible for [Cap] to rectify the timeline unless he found Loki. The minute that Loki does something as dramatic as take the Space Stone, he creates a branched reality.”
“We’re dealing with this idea of multiverses and branched realities,” Anthony added, “so there are many realities.”
In other words, despite the fact that Rogers went back and returned all of the stones the team had taken for their restorative snap, the Space Stone from New York 2012 was still lost because it had been taken by Loki. So unless Cap was able to track down Loki and return it, that means that the villain (or anti-hero?) essentially created his own branched reality. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the character’s Disney+ series will start with this theft, of course, but it’s sound more and more likely.
(Via Business Insider)