Marvel's latest Disney+ series Loki starring Tom Hiddleston is shaping up to be one of Marvel's most anticipated projects yet. But keep in mind, there are no resurrections this time.
The series focuses on the Loki Variant dealing with the fallout of him having stolen the Tesseract during the Avengers: Endgame time heist and now facing the consequences from the mysterious TVA, or Time Variance Authority, and newcomer Mobius M. Mobius played by Owen Wilson.
As promotion ramps up for Loki's release on June 9, fans are beginning to hear from the show's creators about what to expect and what inspired this new corner of the MCU.
THE FANTASTIC FOUR AND BUREAUCRACY INSPIRED THE TVA
According to EW, Loki director Kate Herron claims the TVA was inspired by her love of sci-fi and her own work experience saying, "I had a lot of personal experience in bureaucratic organizations to bring."
"I actually spent a lot of my life working in admin offices as a temp, so I had a lot of personal experience in bureaucratic organizations to bring. I was like, 'These are the detail we need to capture,' being someone who has worked in offices. And also, I love sci-fi, and I wanted to make the show just a big love letter to sci-fi and all the stuff that's inspired me to be a filmmaker."
In addition to science fiction and the mundane office world, Herron was also inspired by film noir and even pitched Mobius as a "hard-boiled detective."
When reflecting on Herron's pitch for the series, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige shared the following:
"She spent a lot of time talking about noir in her initial pitch with us and looking at Mobius, [Owen Wilson's TVA analyst], as a bit of a hard-boiled detective in a nonplussed way. Bringing that vibe to the look of the show, to the bureaucratic procedure of the show is very unique."
But perhaps the most interesting source of inspiration from a fan perspective is that the TVA was also inspired by other Marvel stories including Marvel's first family — The Fantastic Four.
Loki head writer Michael Waldron explained this saying "All of those stories were inspiration."
"We drew inspiration from a wide breadth of ideas as the TVA shows up all throughout [Marvel]. There's Fantastic Four runs, where they're running around, and they're in She-Hulk in a cool way. All of those stories were inspiration in just saying like, 'Alright, what is this crazy organization? And how can we now make them real in a way that you could actually shoot a TV show about them?'"
SOMETHING OLD AND SOMETHING NEW INSPIRED LOKI CREATORS
From the promotional material for Loki alone, it's obvious that the Time Variance Authority, and the series in general, will be something MCU fans haven't seen before.
This, of course, follows Marvel's tradition of genre experimentation. This came earlier in the year with how drastically different both WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier were from one another in regard to style and storytelling.
But Loki looks to take the freedom Disney+ provides to a whole new level.
And while bureaucracy, sci-fi, and film noir as inspirations are intriguing on their own, the fact that the show's creators are still pulling from Marvel canon as source inspiration indicates that they're still dedicated to telling a Marvel story.
And for fans, that's reassuring and yet another reason to be excited about this show.
Loki debuts on Disney+ on June 9, 2021.
