Loki Season 2 Executive Producer Explains How Its Use Of McDonald’s Is More Than Just Product Placement
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Although the Loki Season 2 trailer teased some exciting things to come for the next chapter of Tom Hiddleston’s adventures as the Asgardian God of Mischief, there was an interested plot twist left out of that preview and saved for another one. Earlier this month, McDonald’s released an “As Featured In” video showcasing all the mentions/appearances of the restaurant in various movies and TV shows, and the next season of Loki was among the montage. However, this isn’t just the upcoming Marvel TV show squeezing in some product placement and promoting a tie-in sweet ’n sour sauce in real life, as executive producer Kevin Wright explained that there’s a narrative reason for the fast food chain’s inclusion.
As seen in the first “As Featured In” video and the Loki-specific one following shortly thereafter, the title character, Owen Wilson’s Mobius and an unidentified TVA prisoner will go to McDonald’s to see Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie, his female variant who killed He Who Remains in the Season 1 finale and unleashed the multiverse, and is now working at the one of these restaurants in 1982 Brooklyn. Wright recalled to Fast Company that on the last day of shooting Loki Season 1, the show’s team thought about where Sylvie would go next after “ a decades-long, maybe centuries-long revenge mission,” and Di Martino suggested that her character would “probably be pretty hungry.”
Cut to Season 2’s development, Loki’s writers were having trouble coming up with a storyline for Sylvie. Then they remembered what Di Martino said, picked up the proverbial ball and ran with it. As Kevin Wright explained:
When we stayed in the view of character, this woman who went on the run as a child, had been running through time, a fugitive of time, living in apocalypses, never being able to relax or slow down, the novelty of walking into a 1980s McDonald’s looked appealing. You play a Little League game and go to McDonald’s. You go to a kid’s birthday party at McDonald’s. Someone like Sylvie would never have experienced that, and would be really taken by that.
To be clear, usually with product placement deals like this, an arrangement is reached after the scripting phase is complete. With Marvel Studios, the company then looks through its established brand partnerships and figures out what kind of product placement would work best in the project. For Loki Season 2 though, this 1982 McDonald’s was in the script from the start, and Wright was initially worried that the fast food chain would be worried the show was wanting “to do something ironic or make fun of them,” even though this was about “selling an earnest story, a love letter to nostalgia through a character’s eyes who will see all of the novelty and joy of it.”
Fortunately, Marvel Studios already had a partnership in place with McDonald’s, and the chain embraced having Sylvie as one of its employees in the early 1980s. However, from what little we’ve seen, Loki’s not visiting Sylvie simply to catch up on old times. While the specific plot of Season 2 is still shrouded in mystery, it stands to reason that he’ll need her help with the threats that have emerged (including the Kang variant known as Victor Timely), which will require her to hand in her notice at McDonald’s. It’s also possible Sylvie may be able to shed light on Loki’s timeslipping, as he’s even dealing with this condition within the TVA headquarters, which shouldn’t be possible.
All will start to be revealed when Loki Season 2 premieres to Disney+ subscribers on October 6. Meanwhile, read about how Season 2 is already breaking records for the streaming service and the concern we have about Ke Huy Quan’s appearance as OB.
