Tom Hiddleston lost a role in Marvel’s 2023 overhaul, and the shift came at the same moment the studio was rethinking Daredevil: Born Again after production paused during the Writers’ Strike.
The role Hiddleston would have played was not Loki Laufeyson, the character he first brought to the screen in Thor in 2011 and later carried through Avengers: Endgame in 2019 and the Loki series. Instead, he would have returned to the MCU as himself, a sign of how far Marvel was prepared to push the character beyond the costume. Loki Season 2 ended with the character as the caretaker of the Multiverse at the End of Time, and the part is still set to return in Avengers: Doomsday in 2026.
The timing matters because 2023 was the year Marvel’s slate began to change in ways that touched more than one project. Daredevil: Born Again had been announced in 2022 as an 18-episode Disney+ series and was initially described as a hybrid reboot and continuation. Production paused during the Writers’ Strike, giving Marvel Studios room to review what had been developed and then begin a significant creative rethink. That reevaluation came after a period in which the studio was already trying to decide how to carry forward characters whose recent histories no longer fit a simple straight line.
Daredevil’s own path shows why. The series first premiered on Netflix in 2015, Charlie Cox returned as Matt Murdock in Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021, and Vincent D’Onofrio reappeared around the same time in Hawkeye. After Disney completed its acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019, continuation of the Netflix Daredevil series was halted, leaving Marvel to decide how much of the old world to keep and how much to rebuild. Born Again was the answer until the strike pause forced another look.
What emerges from those moves is a studio willing to discard even a high-profile Hiddleston appearance if the larger plan no longer fits. Marvel’s 2023 overhaul did not just reshuffle schedules; it changed which versions of its best-known characters would move forward, and it left Loki, not Hiddleston as a new Marvel-day self, as the one still headed for the next big crossover.
