Loki director explains how the pandemic helped improve the show

The Marvel Cinematic Universe saw a huge delay back when the first wave of the Coronavirus pandemic started. While the MCU has started to regain its footing with the release of shows like Loki and WandaVision, the universe's movie releases still haven't started back up.

Despite this, the pandemic has seen some positives for MCU projects. For starters, Marvel's Doctor Strange sequel had time to be completely rewritten. Furthermore, Loki director Kate Herron had enough time to tweak the second half of the ongoing TV show.

Loki director explains how the pandemic helped

Speaking on The Deadline Podcast, Loki director Kate Herron revealed that the pandemic helped to polish Loki. COVID restrictions resulted in an eight-month hiatus in production, but Herron kept working on the show.

The director said:

"When we were locked down for example, I had these four months where, you know I didn't know it was going to be four months, but I was just like, 'I'm going to make the best of it.' I started editing everything we filmed already, and I think something that became really clear when we were cutting all our footage together was just that the heart and the tone of it was definitely leaning towards, you know, the show definitely wears its heart on its sleeve."

Transcribed by The Direct

Herron explained that the extra time she had with the footage allowed her to notice the actors’ nuanced performances. In response, the filmmaker edited the scripts for the show's second half to work with the actors’ strengths. She explained:

The real fun thing is as you're cutting into the footage is you see these little nuances that all the actors are doing, and you're like, 'Oh, that's really fun. That's great. Let's push that further in the second half.' So we definitely, based off these cuts I was doing, [we] went back into the scripts and the scenes we hadn't filmed yet when we were able to go back to filming, and it definitely informed the rest of the story going forward, for sure. Just because you know, the nature of making anything, you just get a better handle on the tone of what it is you're actually going for, and what's landing and what's not landing."

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Other MCU productions that benefitted

Doctor Strange 2 writer Michael Waldron previously explained that the pandemic greatly helped the upcoming sequel. Following the departure of director Scott Derrickson, Waldron only had two months to completely rewrite the movie.

Thankfully, the massive delay to Marvel's upcoming movies gave the writer more time to write the movie. In fact, most Marvel films have likely benefitted from the huge studio-wide delays.

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