I hope all you Marvel fans out there haven't already planned massive and super-complicated watch parties tied to Loki's upcoming premiere on Disney+, because the streaming service just dropped a huge announcement that could snap away all those plans. While the MCU's next big TV show was previously set up to make its streaming debut on Friday, June 11, Tom Hiddleston himself revealed in a new video that his beloved half-villain will actually be arriving two days earlier, on Wednesday, June 9. This marks the first time an MCU project, either scripted or unscripted, will premiere on a day other than Fridays.
Tom Hiddleston says it best with the line "Wednesdays are the new Fridays," and while that sadly doesn't mean that Thursdays are the new Saturdays, giving everyone two more days of weekend bliss to talk about Loki, it will be awesome to get a big dose of MCU magnificence to get fans over the Wednesday hump. It also marks a scheduling shift that Disney+ execs will no doubt be paying hard attention to once that happens.
Check out MCU superstar Tom Hiddleston dropping the news himself in the video below. And you can tell it's Hiddlestone proper, since Loki probably would have pushed the premiere date to even later in June, that jokester.
You gotta love how the video starts off with the usual Marvel grandeur, with a booming score and dramatic costume shots, only for Tom Hiddleston to make things a bit more low-key - yeah, I went there - by rocking a plain black shirt in front of a plain white background. So it's clear that Casual Wednesdays are the new Casual Fridays.
Plus, Tom Hiddleston makes a solid point that his Loki does tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to Marvel's heroism-filled montage videos. (Such as the one that recently revealed the official titles for the Captain Marvel and Black Panther sequels, among other things.) So moving Loki to Wednesdays is a big and interesting way for Disney+ to set the show and its central character apart from WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier without making any drastic changes to the content itself. Not that Loki's storyline won't also stand worlds apart from those previous MCU series, even though we're still hoping to see lots of familiar characters along the way.
Loki's shift to Wednesdays feels very much like an idea spawned from the theatrical side of Marvel and Disney execs' headspaces. While Friday releases are usually set to maximize weekend box offices performance when most people are off of school and work, Wednesday releases tend to happen with mega-projects that studios feel confident will draw people out of their homes mid-week. Obviously the strategies aren't the same on the TV side, either for linear networks or for subscription-based streaming platforms, since there's no directly exchange of money taking place at the time of airing. However, it's possible Disney+ wants to test out whether or not mid-week buzz for new episodes will get more people engaged with watching over the weekend that might not have been interested before.
The big question will be whether or not Disney+ decides to keep expanding its premiere plans by having more shows debut throughout the week, rather than keeping Fridays as the go-to. Netflix basically set the bar for Friday debuts, filling the weekend void that tends to plague linear TV networks, and just about every other streaming service has followed in those footsteps, with most (Netflix included) eventually finding ways to utilize other weekdays to entertain audiences. Will Loki be the big inspiration for Disney+? We shall see in time. Or in someone's timeline, anyway.
So be sure to RE-mark your calendars to note that Loki will now start tearing holes in timelines this summer starting on Wednesday, June 9, at the usual time of 3:01 a.m. ET. Maybe after two or three more MCU shows, Disney+ will start releasing episodes at different times throughout the day.
