Post-credits scenes have become the norm for Marvel Studios movies and TV shows, but fans waiting for a Multiverse Saga tease at the end of Loki'sseason 2 finale were left disappointed.
Had Hollywood not spent most of the summer and fall on strike, it's possible a little something might have been added. However, ending the show with "God Loki" powering the new Multiverse while his friends are given the chance to fight back against Kang felt like the right conclusion for the Disney+ series.
It was still surprising not to catch up with the Council of Kangs, though, and in an interview with TV Line, Loki executive producer Kevin Wright revealed why we didn't get any extra teases.
"We didn’t write any [post-credits scenes], and we certainly didn’t shoot any," he confirms. "A lot of people want these things to feel like contained stories. I know some people like the bigger interconnectedness. I think that’s also sometimes becoming a hindrance to some of our stories. For us, it was story closed, that was it."
That's an interesting comment, especially as we've recently heard Marvel Studios is looking to make its Disney+ TV shows more standalone in future. An attempt to expand the MCU across film and streaming hasn't worked (The Marvels is proof of that), and Wright would go on to talk more about how Loki was made without considering any wider plans.
"Our VFX is awesome, it’s so good in this episode. You can’t do that if you’re not locking that stuff in months in advance," he states. "That final sequence was eight months in the making - just in post-production, not talking about shooting. We never really had any consideration for the larger Marvel universe, and that is why these two seasons were good."
"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."
Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania was the first project to build on what we'd seen in Loki, albeit with mixed results. Now, after Kang the Conqueror's defeat at the hands of Scott Lang and Hope Van Dyne, Marvel Studios is said to be considering a new approach to the Multiverse Saga with a different villain.
However, it feels like they're already all-in on Kang and with Jonathan Majors' ongoing legal issues, a recast could be imminent as we head into 2024.