Loki creator Michael Waldron to hopefully get the next two Avengers movies back on track

It looks like Marvel Studios’ plans for the end of the MCU’s “Phase Six” are solidifying behind the scenes… or they’re undergoing even more upheaval and are less solid than ever before. It’s really impossible to tell, and the only person who probably can is Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige—and since he’s too busy designing a baseball hat for the Deadpool 3 premiere, he’s not going to be dishing the dirt any time soon.

Either way, Deadline says that Michael Waldron—creator of Disney+’s Loki and showrunner on its first season—will be writing the next two Avengers movies, initially announced as Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars (though it’s unclear if any of the studio’s initial plans are still in place). Waldron was previously announced as the writer for Secret Wars only, but he’ll now be writing the preceding film as well, which definitely speaks to something even if nobody knows exactly what.

The Kang Dynasty did just lose its director, with Destin Daniel Cretton taking a step back so he could focus on all of the other stuff Marvel is having him do, so it would make sense that the studio would take this as an opportunity to reconfigure some things—if that is what it’s doing. There is also the whole Jonathan Majors factor, which seems relevant here for a number of reasons beyond it being yet another behind-the-scenes thing going on.

If Majors (and his run as new MCU villain Kang) were less of a question mark, Waldron would make a lot of sense: He introduced arguably the most compelling version of that character so far in Loki’s first season, with the version seen in Loki’s second season being… less compelling, so he might have a good handle on what to do for Kang’s big villain movie.

Orrrr maybe Feige trusts him to know how to handle some of the wacky multiverse nonsense that’s going to be happening in these next two movies and it has nothing to do with Kang. After all, Waldron did also write Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, which was almost entirely about that kind of nonsense. That movie was less successful with what it was trying to do than Loki was, though, so it remains impossible to tell how any of us are supposed to feel about this.

Perhaps the one concrete thing that Marvel fans can take away from this is that the studio is still doing something rather than throwing up its hands and waiting for a different Kevin Feige from an alternate universe (this one has a gorgeous head of luxurious hair and never wears baseball hats) to step through an inter-dimensional portal and offer to fix everything. It happened to Spider-Man, so it’s not completely unheard of.