Late last year, Idris Elba let slip the names of some of the major Thor characters that would make brief appearances in Avengers: Age of Ultron. And yet, when the movie actually arrived, no Loki. What happened?
Tom Hiddleston was noticeably — if you were aware he’d filmed scenes for Age of Ultron — absent from the second Avengers movie. Whedon explained how Hiddleston ended up on the cutting room floor in an interview with MTV:
We did shoot something, but it didn’t play. The movie has so much. It’s so filled. We didn’t want it to feel overstuffed. I really wanted to have Loki in it, but I understood the decision that there were now too many voices in the chorus.
[...] At some point the embarrassment of riches is actually embarrassing.
He is right, there are a lot of characters in Age of Ultron, and the ones who don’t show up are even given excuses. Loki’s the only one who doesn’t fit either category, but the ending of Thor: The Dark World actually gives its own explanation as to why.
I’ll eat my hat if the scene isn’t on the DVD/Blu-ray release, though. We already know that the original cut for the movie was three and a half hours long and that the Blu-Ray will have an extended cut of Age of Ultron with a different ending.
Here’s the full interview: