As the god of mischief, it’s quite fitting that the character Loki has faked his death on more than one occasion. At the end of the first Thor film, he fell into a black hole, only to return in The Avengers as the main villain, and in Thor: The Dark World, he was stabbed through the chest in the most random way, only for it to be revealed that he had taken over as king of Asgard under the guise of Odin.

We can all look back fondly at those memories and think, “ah, what fools we were to think he’d actually died.” However, it turns out that latter story was supposed to be real, as Hiddleston revealed on the Empire Podcast.

“Loki’s death on Svartalfheim was written as a death, and I would say Chris and I played that scene for real. That was meant to be that he redeemed himself, he helped save his brother, he helped save Jane Foster but that he, in the process, sacrificed himself.”

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Okay, then. So what happened? It turns out that those in test screenings simply did not believe he died.

“It was part of the original pitch, and in test screenings, the audience didn’t accept it. They said, you know ‘He’s obviously coming back. That didn’t really happen.’ And there was a very strange and almost unanimous resistance to it. They decided that wasn’t the end.”

So screenings didn’t believe it, and as a result, Marvel Studios decided to pull back on the death, leaving Loki open to return yet again in Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Infinity War. Probably a good choice.

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SOURCE: Empire Podcast