What's Loki School? Plus, 6 more facts about Tom Hiddleston’s 'Loki'

Tom Hiddleston as Loki. Cast and crew of the show got special 'Loki lectures' from Hiddleston while they were making the show (screen grab).

Marvel Phase 4 is basically all the comic books-based Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) content - shows and movies - that will come out between 2021 and 2023.

The “phase”, spearheaded by producer Kevin Feige, will be book-ended by WandaVision (the OTT series ran from January to March 2021 internationally) on one side. And on the other side, we’ll have the third Guardians of the Galaxy picture or director Jon Watts’ Fantastic Four - whichever one comes later in 2023.

We’ve already seen WandaVision (starring Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany) and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (with Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan) this year.

Next up, of course, is Loki, which streams weekly starting June 9, 2021. The sixth and final episode with Tom Hiddleston returning in his role as the “god of mischief”, will air on July 14, 2021. The second season of the show is already in development.

We’ll also see phase 4 shows like What If, Ms Marvel, and Hawkeye, and films like Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, and Spider Man: No Way Home this year.

All these shows and movies will stream on Disney+: In April 2009, Walt Disney Co. announced it was acquiring Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. Indeed, until April this year, it looked like all MCU content would be housed on Disney+ alone. That is, until Sony said it had inked a deal with Netflix to show its Marvel titles - the ones not owned by Disney - from 2022.

Now, back to Loki.

About ‘Loki’

1. Loki was killed off by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. The version of Loki we’ll see in the upcoming show is an alternative one that escaped after stealing the Tesseract from Tony Stark in 2012.

2. When a Time Variance Authority (TVA) official tries to arrest Loki for “crimes against the scared timeline” in the Disney+ show opening June 9, he tells them: “It’s been a very long day. And I think I’ve had my fill of idiots in armoured suits telling me what to do…”

3. Owen Wilson plays Loki’s handler, Mobius M. Mobius. Wilson is an agent of the TVA, which arrests “time criminals” and smooths out anomalies in timelines across the shows and films in the Marvel universe.

4. Director Kate Herron told The Mary Sue in an interview that before shooting, Hiddleston took Wilson through what he called “Loki School” - a compendium of knowledge about the character’s evolution over the last 10 years. Wilson said in a pre-release Marvel video that the cast and crew called these sessions the “Loki Lectures”.

5. Loki head writer Michael Waldron has previously written the irreverent comedy, Rick and Morty. Waldron has also been selected by Feige to be the lead writer on the next Doctor Strange film.

6. In an interview to Vanity Fair, Waldron said: “I was always very acutely aware of the fact that there’s a week between each of our episodes and these fans are going to do exactly what I would do, which is pick this apart. We wanted to create a time-travel logic that was so airtight it could sustain over six hours. There’s some time-travel sci-fi concepts here that I’m eager for my Rick and Morty colleagues to see.”

7. Tom Hiddleston is also one of the executive producers on the show. The others are Kevin Feige, Louis D'Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Stephen Broussard, Kate Herron, and Michael Waldron.