Avengers: Secret Wars has not released a single frame of footage, yet a strong case can be made that Marvel Studios already test-drove its central emotional engine two years ago, across two seasons of a Disney+ series about a scheming Asgardian trying to escape bureaucratic purgatory.
The more you line up what happened in Loki with what has leaked, been reported, and been cautiously confirmed about Avengers: Secret Wars, the harder it becomes to treat the overlap as coincidence.
This piece walks through the verifiable hints, on-record interview comments, and credible reporting that connect Loki‘s obsession with erased, rewritten, and recovered memories to the amnesia-driven plot now circulating around Avengers: Secret Wars, and it links out to every publication that has made the case so you can follow the paper trail yourself.
The TVA Was Always a Memory-Wipe Machine
Long before anyone outside Marvel Studios had a plot leak to pore over, Loki built its entire premise on a single disturbing idea: an all-powerful authority could reach into people’s lives, erase what they remembered, and resettle them into a new existence they believed was the only one they’d ever had.
Every Minuteman and analyst at the Time Variance Authority — Mobius, Hunter B-15, Casey — was quietly revealed across season one to be a pruned variant whose original life had been wiped by the TVA itself, with their true memories restored only once the Time-Keepers’ authority collapsed. That is the exact mechanism now rumored to sit at the heart of Avengers: Secret Wars: a singular ruler who holds a fractured multiverse together by making its population forget there was ever anything before him.
This is why so many longtime MCU-watchers now treat Loki less as a self-contained trickster comedy and more as a dry run for Avengers: Secret Wars. The show wasn’t just introducing the multiverse. It was rehearsing the idea that reality can be curated by an overlord, and that memory itself becomes the resistance movement’s last weapon.
OB’s Reset and the “Beyonder” Theory
The clearest, most-discussed piece of foreshadowing comes from Loki season 2, episode 5, when Ouroboros — the TVA’s elder repairman, played by Ke Huy Quan — is reset to his pre-TVA identity as Dr. A.D. Doug, a theoretical physicist and struggling science-fiction novelist who has no memory of the TVA ever existing. That scene spawned a widely shared fan theory proposing that OB, or an unseen variant of him, could effectively be playing the role of the Beyonder in a future Secret Wars story, orchestrating events after Kang’s defeat as something closer to a personal creative experiment than a straightforward villain plot.
Related speculation has floated around OB’s glasses functioning as a disguise meant to make him appear ordinary and mortal, hiding a far larger cosmic identity underneath. GamesRadar laid out the full theory here, and it remains one of the earliest examples of fans explicitly tying a Loki memory-reset sequence directly to Avengers: Secret Wars.
What makes the OB scene worth revisiting now isn’t whether he turns out to be the Beyonder. It’s that the show chose to dramatize the experience of a forgotten life being switched back on — confusion, grief, disorientation, and then reconstruction — as its emotional climax, which is precisely the beat multiple Avengers: Secret Wars leaks now describe happening to Marvel’s biggest heroes.
Michael Waldron Was Asked About Secret Wars Before the Show Even Aired
This connection isn’t just fan pattern-matching after the fact. Loki head writer Michael Waldron was asked directly, before the series premiered in 2021, whether its opening animated history of the TVA — which references a prior “multiversal war” and warns that altering timelines risks triggering new multiversal conflicts — was intended to set up Avengers: Secret Wars. Waldron’s response stopped short of confirming anything, but he notably didn’t deny that the show was deliberately gesturing toward Secret Wars either. Screen Rant’s full breakdown of that exchange is available here.
The original interview ran on Murphy’s Multiverse, where Charles Murphy asked Waldron point-blank whether the TVA’s backstory and its warning about multiversal conflict was meant to tee up Avengers: Secret Wars.
Waldron acknowledged the audience would likely read into it exactly what Marvel intended them to, while declining to confirm the connection outright, and the outlet noted that Secret Wars had felt like the inevitable follow-up ever since Avengers: Endgame wrapped the Infinity Saga. You can read the exclusive in full on Murphy’s Multiverse.
The Direct covered the same exchange separately, framing it as the first real hint that the MCU’s next major saga-ending event would be Avengers: Secret Wars — read that writeup here. Notably, Waldron went on to write Avengers: Doomsday, and is credited as a writer on Avengers: Secret Wars itself, giving his early, carefully hedged comments considerably more weight in hindsight.
He Who Remains and the War That Already Happened
Loki season 1’s finale introduced He Who Remains, the Kang variant who claimed to have ended a catastrophic multiversal war by pruning every branching timeline except one and installing himself — and the TVA — as the sole gatekeeper of reality.
That framing device is itself a smaller-scale blueprint for the overlord structure now attached to Avengers: Secret Wars: one entity imposing a single, curated timeline on a population that has no memory of the war that preceded it, or of the lives that were sacrificed to make that peace possible.
Sportskeeda’s early episode-by-episode breakdown flagged this parallel back when the show was still airing, specifically noting how the TVA’s framing of a past “multiversal war” lined up with Marvel’s long-rumored plans for Avengers: Secret Wars — that analysis is here.
When Sylvie kills He Who Remains at the end of season 1, she doesn’t just end a villain — she detonates the single mechanism that was suppressing the multiversal war he claimed to have stopped, a direct, structural preview of the Incursion crisis now central to leaked Avengers: Secret Wars plot summaries.
Season 2’s Ending Reframes Loki as the Next Keeper of Memory
Loki season 2 closes with its protagonist voluntarily becoming a new kind of overseer, weaving the branching timelines into a stable structure so the rest of the multiverse can exist without collapsing into war.
Early in that season, Mobius tells a time-slipping Loki that there still needs to be a “Loki Who Remains” before anyone can figure out what to do about He Who Remains’ many variants — a line widely read as connective tissue toward a future role for Loki in fixing the multiverse during Secret Wars itself. Screen Rant’s full theory piece on this evidence is here.
That finale fed directly into a wave of theorizing about what role Loki might actually play once Avengers: Secret Wars arrives. One widely circulated theory argues that Loki’s real “glorious purpose” all along was to become the central figure of Secret Wars, potentially even stepping into the “God Emperor” role traditionally associated with Doctor Doom in the comics, given how naturally his arc mirrors the Doom–Reed Richards dynamic at the heart of the source material. Screen Rant’s argument for that reading is here
A follow-up piece pushed the theory further, proposing that Loki’s new status as the MCU’s “God of Stories” positions him to effectively replace Doctor Doom’s Secret Wars role, since the live-action version of Doom won’t have had time to build the same longstanding bonds with Marvel’s heroes that the comics’ Victor von Doom accumulated over decades. That full theory is here.
Whether or not Loki ends up occupying Doom’s narrative function, what’s notable is that every version of this theory keeps landing on the same idea Loki trained audiences to expect: someone has to hold the multiverse’s memory together, and whoever does it inherits enormous, morally ambiguous power — the exact dynamic now attributed to Doom himself in Avengers: Secret Wars.
The Leaked Secret Wars Plot Reads Like a Scaled-Up TVA
This is where the theory stops feeling speculative and starts feeling uncomfortably precise. Multiple outlets have reported on an alleged plot leak for Avengers: Secret Wars that describes Doctor Doom, following his victory in Avengers: Doomsday, reconstructing a shattered multiverse into a single patchwork world called Battleworld.
According to that leak, the story reportedly picks up roughly a year after Doom’s win, with the population of Battleworld believing their medieval, feudal reality is the only one that has ever existed — none of them remember the lives, or universes, Doom erased to build it. SlashFilm’s full report on the leak and the fan backlash it triggered is here, with Yahoo Entertainment’s companion coverage available here.
Crucially, that same leak claims Doom achieves this by stealing Loki’s cosmic power — the very timeline-weaving ability Loki spent two seasons learning to wield — and using it as the engine that holds Battleworld together. The leak further states that Doom deliberately allows Steve Rogers to retain his real memories, specifically so he can rub his victory in Steve’s face, which several outlets have pointed out mirrors the structure of Avengers: Endgame closely enough to read as a deliberate narrative echo.
Murphy’s Multiverse published a more detailed rundown of the same leak, reporting that Battleworld only continues to exist because Doom is actively siphoning and sustaining it with Loki’s stolen power, and that the emotional core of the film is expected to center on the handful of characters who explicitly remember everything that was lost. That piece is here.
A separate forum breakdown circulating the same alleged Doomsday-into-Secret Wars plot describes Doom building a new, quasi-medieval world where nobody remembers their previous life, with the multiverse only restored once Loki reclaims his stolen power from Doom.
That discussion thread, hosted on Comic Vine, is here. A more detailed leak reported by ThatParkPlace goes further still, claiming Doom resurrects the dead across the multiverse inside Battleworld and erases their memories wholesale, leaving familiar characters living entirely new lives inside his false reality while he rules as Emperor. That full report is here.
Strip away the character names, and that is, almost beat for beat, the TVA’s operating model from Loki season one — an all-powerful figure curating a single reality, resetting the people inside it, and holding the whole structure together through a power source only he fully controls. If even half of this reporting holds up, Avengers: Secret Wars isn’t just borrowing a theme from Loki. It’s scaling that show’s central mechanism up to a multiversal canvas.
Confirmed Facts Behind the Leaks
It’s worth separating rumor from record. Marvel has officially dated Avengers: Secret Wars for release on December 17, 2027, with Anthony and Joe Russo directing and Michael Waldron — Loki‘s own head writer — credited on the script, a structural echo of the Markus-and-McFeely arrangement that carried Avengers: Infinity War into Avengers: Endgame.
Reporting has consistently indicated the film draws from Jonathan Hickman’s 2015 Secret Wars comic run, in which colliding universes are salvaged into a patchwork Battleworld ruled over by Doom as a god, though Marvel itself has not confirmed that structure. A detailed tracker of confirmed-versus-rumored details for Avengers: Secret Wars is maintained here.
The source comic backs up why the memory angle matters so much. In the 2015 Secret Wars event, the finished Battleworld was built out of Warzones and a central Battleworld infrastructure assembled from the fragments of destroyed realities, with figures including Loki and Magneto experiencing their final adventures before the Marvel Universe’s end. Background on the source material is available on Wikipedia.
Marvel Comics has also been actively expanding the Incursions storyline on the page as the films approach; a new five-part Secret Wars Incursions comic project was announced in August 2026, explicitly designed to bridge the gap toward the films by revisiting the chaotic period before Hickman’s original event, with Marvel confirming Avengers: Secret Wars is targeting a December 17, 2027 release.
SuperHeroHype’s report on that announcement is here. A broader plot and casting primer for Avengers: Secret Wars, including the Beyonders’ role in triggering the Incursions that collapse the multiverse, is available via Yahoo Entertainment here.
Even the rumored resistance movement against Doom leans on memory as its organizing principle. An October 2026 casting rumor reported by Murphy’s Multiverse claims a group of young heroes — reportedly including Billy Kaplan, Tommy Shepherd, Cassie Lang, Kate Bishop and Kamala Khan — survive the final Incursion by sheltering in the Quantum Realm and retain their memories specifically because of it, with speculation that their mission involves locating a memory-wiped or lost Wanda Maximoff to help overthrow Doom. That report is here.
Why the Loki Parallel Holds Up
Put all of this side by side, and the pattern is hard to dismiss as coincidence. Loki spent two seasons building a world where an overlord’s authority depends entirely on people not remembering what came before — and where recovering those memories is the act that finally breaks his control.
Every available leak, rumor, and confirmed detail about Avengers: Secret Wars describes Doctor Doom doing exactly that, at a vastly larger scale, using the very power he stole from Loki to do it. Michael Waldron, who wrote the TVA’s memory-wipe premise into Loki and reportedly carried that sensibility into both Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, has never denied the connection when directly asked about it.
None of this is confirmed by Marvel Studios, and every plot leak discussed here should be treated as unverified until the studio says otherwise. But as a thematic thesis, the case writes itself: Avengers: Secret Wars may not be introducing a brand-new idea to the MCU at all. It may simply be Loki‘s memory-wipe premise finally let loose on the entire multiverse.
