MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: A cameo appearance of Tom Hiddleston as Loki was cut from Avengers: Age of Ultron because audiences assumed that he was more involved in the film than just a cameo.
All said and done, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is one of the most notable characters in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. He was the main villain of both the first Thor movie AND the first Avengers movie. He was also a secondary villain in Thor: The Dark World and a villain/ally in Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame before starring in his own Disney+ series where his actions (and that of his variant) have unleashed the Multiverse on the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or should we say the Marvel Cinematic MULTIVERSE?).
However, Loki missed one of the Avengers movies, the second one in the series, Avengers: Age of Ultron. The interesting thing is that he initially DID appear in the film but was cut out of the movie during the editing process!
The reasoning seems like it is threefold, but one of the major reasons appears to have come down to Loki being just too big of a bad guy for him to appear in a movie as a cameo without fans thinking he was more involved.
As a recap, during the Avengers’ initial battle against Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff messes with the Avengers’ minds a bit and during her time messing with Thor, he sees a vision of an apocalyptic future. The Avengers head to Hawkeye’s farmhouse to regroup after their battle with Wanda (specifically the part where she uses her mental powers to make the Hulk go nuts, forcing Iron Man to break out a special “Hulkbuster” armor to stop the rampaging Hulk). Thor breaks from the team to go visit his friend, Dr. Eric Selvig and they go to a special “Waters of Sight” and Thor has a vision there of the destruction of Asgard, the birth of the Vision and the introduction of the Infinity Stones…
It’s a relatively short and kind of disjointed sequence. This is because it was originally much longer, and initially involved Hiddleston as Loki, as well!
Whedon explained to the Empire Podcast why the scene had to be cut down:
“There was a 195-minute cut of this movie. [As concerns the Thor / Erik subplot], the original scene was that Thor went to speak to the Norn and how it would work was that he’d go in the pool and the Norn possess him, basically, and Erik Selvig asks all the questions, and the Norn, speaking through Thor, give the answers. So Chris [Hemsworth] got to do something different, and he really threw himself into it, and he did a beautiful job, but it wasn’t well regarded by the test audiences and I feel it’s probably largely because it was a rough cut with no effects, but also because it’s something that in a Thor movie would work brilliantly, but in this movie is just a little too left of centre.”
It sounds like Hiddleston wasn’t actually in the original version, but showed up instead in a reworked version, where they split it into two sequences, but again, the studio was not having it, as Whedon explained, “I do feel like they threw out the baby with the pond water, because I tried to set it up so people would accept it when it happens. Instead, we split the dream up, and then we had Loki in the second part of the dream, but then they were like, ‘That doesn’t work, do we want to introduce Loki now, this late?’”
Eventually, it came down to cutting the cave sequence or cutting the Hawkeye farmhouse sequence and Whedon agreed to cut the cave, noting, “The dreams were not an executive favourite. The dreams, the farmhouse, these were things I fought [for]. With the cave, they pointed a gun at the farm’s head and ‘Give us the cave’. They got the farm. In a civilised way – I respect these guys, but that’s when it got really unpleasant. There was a point when there was going to be no cave, and Thor was going to leave and come back and say, ‘I figured some stuff out.’ And at that point I was so beaten down, I was like, ‘Sure, okay… what movie is this?’ The editors were like, ‘No no, you have to show the thing, you just can’t say it.’ I was like, ‘Okay, thank you, we can figure this out!’ You can tell it was beaten down, but it was hard won.”
So Whedon feels that the scene didn’t look as good without the full special effects, but he also felt that the audience felt that the extended vision sequence seemed out of place in the movie. However, Tom Hiddleston explained a third reason why the scene was cut, and it was that his cameo confused viewers since they thought it meant he had a bigger part in the story. He told Digital Spy about it, “I was part of the dream sequence for the character of Thor, and I shot for a day and enjoyed it very much. I received a phone call from [Marvel Studios President] Kevin Feige — actually, Joss [Whedon] emailed me. But basically, Kevin said — and I’m just going to tell you the truth, because it’s the cleanest way of doing it — in test screenings, audiences had over-emphasized Loki’s role. So they thought that because I was in it, that I was controlling Ultron.”
In other words, the audiences were confused as to why Loki didn’t show up again and so it was determined that it was simpler to just cut Loki to avoid any sort of confusion.
I think all three of the reasons sound reasonable enough, so I’m willing to go with the legend as being….
STATUS: True
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