Disney+'s Doctor Who Replacement Officially Becomes A Streaming Hit Before New Movie

Published Sep 28, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT

Tom is a Senior Staff Writer at Screen Rant, with expertise covering everything from hilarious sitcoms to jaw-dropping sci-fi epics.

Initially he was an Updates writer, though before long he found his way to the TV and movies team. He now spends his days keeping Screen Rant readers informed about the TV shows of yesteryear, whether it's recommending hidden gems that may have been missed by genre fans or deep diving into ways your favorite shows have (or haven't) stood the test of time.

Tom is based in the UK and when he's not writing about TV shows, he's watching them. He's also an avid horror fiction writer, gamer, and has a Dungeons and Dragons habit that he tries (and fails) to keep in check.

For decades, Doctor Who was the go-to series for accessible time-travel-based sci-fi adventure. Sadly though, years of uneven storytelling and questionable creative decisions have diminished a series that once dominated pop culture conversation. Doctor Who has an enormous legacy, but its modern incarnation is a shadow of the phenomenon it once was.

Doctor Who may no longer have households gathering around the television each week as it once did, but the appetite for spectacle-heavy time-travel science fiction never disappeared. Audiences still crave strange worlds, impossible timelines, eccentric heroes, and reality-threatening paradoxes. The problem was that Doctor Who stopped delivering. Nature abhors a vacuum, and Disney+'s Loki arrived in 2021 and quickly occupied the space Doctor Who once held, turning Marvel's God of Mischief into the center of an accessible time-hopping adventure built for the streaming era.

For the uninitiated, Loki follows Tom Hiddleston as the titular deity (or, rather, a variant of him created when he escapes with the Tesseract during Avengers: Endgame) as he becomes entangled with the Time Variance Authority and the fate of the multiverse. Three years after season 2 ended, Loki is surging in popularity once again. At the time of writing, Loki is Disney+'s most-watched television series globally and sits at No. 5 in the US (via FlixPatrol). That is impressive in itself, but timing is everything here, as its renewed popularity coincides with Marvel making Loki's corner of the MCU crucial again.

Loki Is The Definitive Time Travel Adventure Of The Streaming Era

It would be difficult for any series to truly replace Doctor Who, especially given how much the British show helped define television sci-fi across its 60+ year run. However, Loki has increasingly occupied the same space for modern streaming audiences. Both shows make enormously complicated concepts, particularly when it comes to time-travel, accessible through charismatic leads, visually distinctive locations, and adventures capable of moving from comedy to existential science fiction remarkably quickly.

Doctor Who has, in recent years, suffered from something of an identity crisis and forgotten that this is the core of its appeal. It’s no surprise that Loki, with its focused story unburdened by having to adhere to decades of lore, has started to take its place. While Doctor Who has repeatedly struggled under decades of conflicting creative story decisions, Loki told a satisfying two-season narrative. What's more, Loki's relationship with Mobius (Owen Wilson), and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) brings the same sense of interpersonal drama and comedy that defines the Doctor and his companions.

The stories of both shows are very different, but they have the same appeal as viewing experiences. An important factor to consider too is that Loki also has the MCU behind it. Its story is slick and streamlined, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The series is able to introduce complicated sci-fi and multiverse ideas while using one of Marvel's most recognizable characters as its anchor. This hugely aids accessibility, something Doctor Who had at its most mainstream, back when viewers didn't need to understand decades of mythology to enjoy it.

That combination pretty much ensured Loki was destined to be the successor to the niche Doctor Who once dominated. It is funny, strange, visually ambitious, and unapologetically interested in time travel, but never loses sight of its central character or what makes it fun to watch in the first place. Its renewed streaming success years after its finale proves that the formula still has considerable appeal, though this latest spike in interest has a very clear cause.

Loki’s Streaming Resurgence Couldn’t Come At A Better Time

Loki reaching No. 1 globally on Disney+ would be remarkable given its age. Season 2 concluded in 2023, meaning there are no new episodes driving viewers back. However, there’s an obvious reason for the latest resurgence. The theatrical re-release of Avengers: Endgame, titled Avengers: Endgame Encore, arrived in September and gave MCU fans an excellent reason to revisit Loki. Two new post-credit scenes make both the TVA and Loki himself look incredibly important for the plot of the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.

One addition extends Steve Rogers' (Chris Evans) and Peggy Carter’s (Hayley Atwell) final Avengers: Endgame scene. In the new footage in Endgame Encore, someone knocks at their door, and Peggy discovers Loki waiting outside in his TVA uniform. Then there’s the new post credit scene that returns to the TVA. In it, Mobius and Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan) witness multiple universes warring with one another as reality begins collapsing toward a multiversal catastrophe.

Those scenes fundamentally reposition Loki. The TVA is no longer merely background material from an MCU Disney+ series. It’s directly connected to the multiverse collapse at the center of Avengers: Doomsday. That makes Loki an obvious choice for an MCU rewatch before the new Avengers movie arrives on December 18th. Years after completing its two-season story, Marvel's definitive time-travel series has suddenly become relevant again, and the MCU has let slip that Loki is still burdened with glorious purpose after all.