Thanos was a pretty darn great villain in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, but something tells us that Loki will go down as the MCU’s finest baddie yet. Tom Hiddleston’s God of Mischief has just been such a treat to watch over the years – the definition of a bad guy you love to hate. It seems Marvel didn’t simply luck out in getting such an excellent antagonist, though, as the writer of 2011’s Thor has revealed he was under strict instructions to create a brilliant villain.
While a guest on The Fanboy Podcast, screenwriter Zack Stentz spoke about how he knew when working on the script for the God of Thunder’s origins movie that the plan was for Loki to go on to become the main antagonist of The Avengers. Because of his importance, Marvel told the writer to make sure he was as good a villain as Magneto.
“It’s a complicated issue because we had a very clear mandate when we were writing Thor. They already knew that they were building towards The Avengers and they already had the notion that Loki was going to be the villain. They knew that their villains thus far in the MCU had been a bit underwhelming, and they said — one of the executives literally said, ‘Look, if you fail at everything else, give us a villain as good as Magneto in Loki.’ We need someone at that level because that’s going to be our villain for The Avengers.”
If Marvel wanted a villain on a par with Magneto, they came to the right person in Stentz, as he and his writing partner Ashley Edward Miller also provided the script for the same year’s X-Men: First Class, which introduced Michael Fassbender’s acclaimed take on Erik Lensherr.
Stentz went on to explain how he and Miller went about making sure Loki was a top-tier villain, with the key proving that he had to be “sympathetic” despite his evil actions.
“We always put a lot of effort into our villains, but in this case we really worked hard giving Loki an interesting story and making him sympathetic at the same time as he’s doing these terrible things.”
Well, when it comes to attempting to make Loki a first-class foe, it was definitely mission accomplished. The trickster might have died in Infinity War, but Endgame resurrected him in an alternate timeline. Hiddleston is set to reprise his role, too – at least in a voiceover capacity – for the upcoming Disney Plus series.