14 DAY TRIAL // In November last year, when Marvel and director Joss Whedon were still struggling to keep many of the details of the latest “Avengers” movie, “Age of Ultron,” under wraps, Idris Elba accidentally let the cat out of the bag and revealed plans for a cameo from himself and Tom Hiddleston.
Elba played Heimdall in both “Thor” movies, while Hiddleston is fan-favorite Loki in both these and the first “Avengers” movie. Loki has been such an unexpected hit with the fans that they have even petitioned Marvel to give him his own standalone pic, which hasn’t happened yet.
It probably never will, but there’s a promise from the studio that the 2018 release, “Thor: Ragnarok,” will be Loki-heavy. So what happened to the “Ultron” cameo?
Idris Elba misspoke, or something like it
“Avengers: Age of Ultron” opened wide on Friday, May 1, 2015, and is poised to become the highest selling, most record-breaking, biggest release from Marvel. Reviews for it aren’t as good as they were with the first film, mostly because this installment aims to do too much, to cram too much action into the space of 2 hours and 21 minutes, to the point where it becomes overwhelming and tiresome.
If you’ve seen it, you already know that Elba’s character does make a brief appearance, during one of Thor’s Scarlet Witch-induced “dreams.” Loki, however, isn’t in it, even though Elba had said that he and Hiddleston had been asked back on set to shoot a scene with Chris Hemsworth, who plays the powerful God of Thunder.
So what happened?
As director Joss Whedon tells MTV News (video below), Elba “misspoke” and it would have been in very bad form if he corrected him in the press after the fact.
However, Whedon adds, Hiddleston did shoot a cameo, so Elba did really speak the truth. It just wasn’t included on the final cut of the film because it didn’t play out right, there were already “too many singers in the choir.”
In other words, the film wasn’t already too much to throw Loki in there as well.
On the bright side, if Hiddleston did shoot his cameo, at least fans can hope for it to be included on the Blu-ray / DVD release as an extra. For many of them, having to wait until 2018 to get a new look at their favorite villain might simply be too much.
Loki the underdog
Hiddleston first auditioned for the role of Thor and was even willing to bulk up as much as he was told to, if only he could secure the part. In the end, Kenneth Branagh, the director of the first “Thor” movie, deemed him a much better option for Loki, Thor’s evil half-brother.
Loki’s first big screen appearance was such a hit that he was included in the first “Avengers” film as well, and was even asked back for reshoots to further increase his screentime in that release. The fans, Marvel would soon learn, could simply not get enough of the character.
When they sent him to Comic-Con in 2013 and he crashed the Marvel panel (in full costume, of course), the fans and the media in the audience, and the people at home keeping up to speed with the festival online, went crazy.
Loki was supposed to be just another bad guy, but he had become much more than this. In “Thor: The Dark World,” he actually managed to completely steal the spotlight from his brother Thor. That’s not a feat every villain out there can brag about.
So no wonder the fans were unpleasantly surprised to see that the cameo in “Ultron” they were promised never happened.
