In Loki Michael Waldron wrote a proper double act and kept interrupting it to explain the timeline. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness the explaining was most of what was left, and only Elizabeth Olsen was in a story.
Fi1m perspective
Loki is arrested within minutes of arriving in the Gobi Desert, and the people who arrest him work in an office. Michael Waldron's Loki (2021) takes the franchise's best villain, removes his powers, his brother and his audience, and puts him across a desk from Owen Wilson in a Time Variance Authority designed like a 1970s tax department. For most of a season that is the show, and it is enough. Hiddleston talks, Wilson listens, and the god of mischief finds out he is a small item in someone else's paperwork. Then somebody explains how the timeline works, and somebody else explains it again in the next episode.
That habit is Waldron's signature and his problem. He learned the trade under Dan Harmon, on Community (2014) and then Rick and Morty (2019–2020), a show we rate and one that belongs to Harmon and Justin Roiland rather than to any of its staff writers. He made something of his own with Heels (2021), a family drama set in a Georgia wrestling promotion, and he has said that what he wanted Loki to be was "a character piece of Loki as he existed in the MCU". When he is allowed to write two people in a room he is good at it. The Hiddleston and Wilson scenes are real double-act writing, and Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) is the only person in that film who is in a story.
The trouble is that Marvel does not hire him for two people in a room. It hires him for the rules, and he obliges. Multiverse of Madness is Sam Raimi's film for about a third of its length, corpses and crash zooms and a skewered eyeball, and Waldron's script for the other two thirds, which are spent telling us who America Chavez is, what the Darkhold does and why a witch living quietly in an orchard is now a problem for every universe. Strange himself is given one question, whether he is happy, asked at a wedding, in a dream and on a rooftop, and the man who ends the film is the man who began it. We were irritated by it, and what irritated us was that the writer who had put Loki behind a desk and made it funny had spent two hours reading out the small print. By the second season of Loki the small print had taken over there as well.
He is now writing Avengers: Doomsday (2026) and Secret Wars (2027), the films in which every universe arrives at once and somebody will have to say what the rules are. Chad Powers (2025), a comedy he created with Glen Powell outside Marvel, has no timeline in need of pruning. We would rather see what he does with that.
Biography
Michael Waldron is an American screenwriter and producer. He graduated from the University of Georgia in 2010 and completed an MFA in screenwriting at Pepperdine University.
Waldron began his career as an intern on the first season of the animated series Rick and Morty before joining the writing staff. He wrote the season four episode "The Old Man and the Seat" (2019). He created and served as head writer on the Marvel series Loki (2021–2023) and created the Starz series Heels (2021–2023). His film credits include writing Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). He also created the series Chad Powers (2025).
Waldron shared in a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program for his work on Rick and Morty.
