It looks like everyone’s favorite cry-baby villain won’t go another round with THE AVENGERS.
When talking MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING and future projects on the Empire Magazine podcast, Joss Whedon states that the success of the first AVENGERS had a lot to do with the fresh material and surprises, “Everyone is going to be looking for the Loki-Hulk smash moment.” Then adds that, “Imitating what I did before is the surest way to do it not as well.” It might also be of interest of you to know that Whedon told GQ mag that he already had the story for the second film laid out and is currently keeping watch to make sure nothing overlaps.
The director kept the pace talking about how that figures into his creative consultant gig, “My deal with Marvel is I have a consulting deal with them as well as a contract to make ‘Avengers.’ That means I’ll read all the scripts, I’ll look at cuts. Kevin [Feige] runs the thing and he knows what he wants, and I think that they’re doing great stuff, but I like to be able to help and occasionally to go ‘you know, that’s really going to kill us on the second ‘Avengers.’ ‘ Since the story has already been approved and everybody knows what we’re doing with ‘Avengers 2,’ we can really lay it out. It’s not like anyone’s saying ‘well I don’t know, what if I need that?’ It’s like ‘doing this is troublesome for us, whereas doing this will actually help us.’ It’s a dance, but I had to do it on the first one too. You want to honour the events of the last movie but you don’t want to be beholden to them, because some people will see ‘Avengers’ who did not see any of the movies inbetween or even ‘Avengers 1.'”
Another Whedon project that will have to deal with the interconnected Marvel comic movie universe is AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. but instead of it being all about the supes this series will focus more on those without superhuman abilities, “It basically opens with the idea that since ‘The Avengers’ things have changed. Now everybody knows that there are gods and monsters, and what is the world like? It’s about being the people who aren’t super and what it is like for them. There will be people with powers and there will be exciting otherworldly mysteries and all that good stuff, but it’s all in the service of finding the humanity of the thing. And [Agent] Coulson was that in the movies; he was the voice of us, the one who says, ‘I don’t know what’s going on – these guys are super, they’re from this other place… but we’re dealing with it.'”
All that said, I’m completely okay with missing out on more Loki. Tom Hiddleston does a fantastic job in the role, but why spread one character so thin? If you put him in every flick then you easily grow tired of him and when he does pop up then the affect is unexpected. Plus, we get to catch him next in THOR: THE DARK WORLD.