Oh lots and lots of reasons.
Narratively it makes sense from the footage we’ve seen so far. Thanos’s ship shows up at the Ark at the end of Ragnarok, then from IW footage we see a bunch of dead Asgardians, we see Thor about to get crushed by Thanos, we see Loki offering up the Tesseract…then Thor gets picked up by the GOTG floating through space and looking all burnt and stuff. Plus from The Avengers we know that Thanos is probably pretty pretty pretty pissed at him.
Combined with the rumor that someone dies in the first five minutes, it’s not hard to guess who that might be.
From a utilitarian standpoint it makes sense too. There are SO MANY characters in IW, and there is no way they’re going to want to focus screen time on a secondary/tertiary character who’s not even a hero. It makes more sense to get him out of the way as soon as possible. Even more so when you consider that Loki is such a wild card…just his PRESENCE in Thor’s vision in Ultron was enough to confuse people and make them think he was behind everything and they had to get rid of it…best to just fridge him in IW.
From a “Hollywood” villain redemption standpoint it also makes sense. Hollywood doesn’t know how to redeem bad guys without killing them. They’ve been trying to make Loki more of a good guy, and what better way to complete that journey than to have him killed by Thanos while trying to save Thor’s life.
Also Loki is in practically none of the promo stuff, just the one shot of him with the Tesseract, and the only other bit we’ve seen of him was from filming a bit for Avengers 4 that was clearly a flashback or some kind of time travel to the past, which makes me suspect it’s because he’s just not in most of it.
Anyway, I WILL BE ABSOLUTELY ECSTATIC IF I’M WRONG.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Ugh, I hate that your reasoning is so convincing. I haven’t heard the rumor that someone dies in the first 5 minutes, though. Where did that come from? And what about the thing Feige said about Loki being allied with Thanos in Infinity War? That would be a really misleading way of characterizing “he hands over the Tesseract and gets killed immediately afterward.” (It would still be misleading, but somewhat more conventionally so, if the situation is what I hope it is: Loki pretends to be helping Thanos, but is planning to betray him.)
I’m somewhat inclined to think that they’d only be doing the flashback in Avengers 4 to Loki’s arrest at the end of The Avengers if Loki was still around and they were trying to clarify something about his motivations or his relationship with the Avengers. I could be wrong, but otherwise I’m not sure what the significance of the flashback would be.
If they are planning to kill him by having him sacrifice himself to save Thor and/or stop Thanos, I wonder if they have plans to bring in a Kid Loki. @sexualthorientation‘s recent posts have been making me want to see Timothée Chalamet as an adolescent Loki, Agent of Asgard…
I kind of assumed that the “flashback” was actually someone using the Time Stone to go back in time and maybe grab the Tesseract in the past…there have also been pictures of Tony with gray hair, which makes me suspect Time Stone fuckery…Loki’s arrest would be a good time to grab it since it was nicely contained in that little canister thingy, and his presence would just be incidental. Anyway, mostly baseless speculation.
I would bet a substantial sum of money that they have absolutely no plans for Loki in the movies beyond this at all, and that Kid Loki will not be making any kind of appearance. I’d even be surprised to see Thor after these two Avengers movies.
Aw, shit, the time travel thing didn’t occur to me. God damn it. I still really hope you’re wrong, and I’m clinging to the Feige statement.
You’re probably right about Kid Loki, I was just fantasizing for a bit there…
Loki is the Philosopher King 