Marvel already had a sizable PR problem heading into Loki Season 2 with the Jonathan Majors mess going on. The actor made his MCU debut in the first season of Loki before fully emerging as the next Thanos-level threat in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. However, shortly after that film’s release, Majors was arrested on domestic violence charges and is awaiting trial later this month.
Unfortunately for Marvel, Majors’ arrest happened after filming had already wrapped for Loki Season 2, and early reviews for the first four episodes couldn’t help but note the awkwardness of his presence. That issue was compounded when a Variety report on the behind-the-scenes panic at Marvel contained an eyebrow-raising quote about the Season 2 finale.
“Marvel is truly f*cked with the whole Kang angle,” a source told Variety about the finale, which the trade publication claimed would further position Majors as the MCU’s next big threat. “They haven’t had an opportunity to rewrite until very recently [because of the WGA strike]. But I don’t see a path to how they move forward with him.”
But then something interesting happened. The Loki Season 2 finale arrived without positioning Majors as the next major MCU villain. In fact, the episode actually made it easer to just forget about the Kang variants altogether. There’s literally a line from Owen Wilson’s Mobius that minimizes the events of Quantumania because the heroes on that timeline “handled it.”
Some sort of tinkering could have taken place, but Loki executive producer Kevin Wright denies that’s the case. In an interview with TVLine, Wright says that the episode was not altered. “The story that is on screen is the one that we set out to make,” he said.
So what happened? Well, according to Wright, Variety did not have all its facts straight. “That report was crazy. I’ll just say that,” Wright said. “That just shows you, I don’t know what people are talking about.”
Wright further denied editing the Season 2 finale to address the Majors situation, and he also said there were never plans for a post-credits scene because it would take away from the epic impact of Loki claiming his throne.
“We never really had any consideration for the larger Marvel universe, and that is why these two seasons were good,” Wright said. “We built our own corner of the sandbox, we told our own story. People got excited about that and went, ‘Oh, Kang!’ and started building on top of that. But to us, we were the keepers of nearly 12 hours of that storytelling, and we wanted that to come to a close.”
Loki is available for streaming on Disney+.
