The trouble with Thunderbolts* is that this is a superhero team made up almost entirely of all those Marvel characters you had completely forgotten existed. Not the cool ones who get their own Funko Pops. We’re talking about the B-team – the backup Avengers. The ones who showed up to the superhero cookout but left before anyone got to taste the chimichangas.
It’s not that Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova and David Harbour’s Red Guardian are boring, per se. Their spiky father-daughter banter was the highlight of 2021’s Black Widow (because, let’s be honest, it certainly wasn’t Ray Winstone’s Russian accent, which took more detours than a lost tourist on the Moscow metro). But if they had never turned up again in a Marvel movie – and that would have been a pity – it’s quite possible nobody would have ever noticed.
How about Wyatt Russell’s US Agent? Well yes, he was a fun little hate-magnet in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but do we really need him back? Likewise, Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier, who is somehow still hanging around like Cap’s forgotten emotional baggage long after his buddy disappeared into the past. Finally, there’s Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost from 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp. Remember her? Somewhere out there it might just be that there’s a secret society of Ghost fans furiously petitioning Marvel for her return, though if there were you might think we would have heard about it by now.
None of this means that Jake Schreier’s Thunderbolts*, the first trailer for which debuted this week, is doomed to be the latest Marvel disappointment , but it does rather feed into a sense that the comic book studio is still rooting around at the bottom of its character portfolio for all the intellectual property that it just can’t shoehorn into anything else.
It recalls DC’s unfortunate Suicide Squad (2016), which brought us a host of antiheroes nobody had ever heard of and expected them to pack out the multiplexes. This despite Will Smith playing an assassin who’s more used to discussing his feelings over a smoothie than actually killing anyone, and the debatable merits of Cara Delevingne’s Enchantress and her remarkable perfection of the art of evil voodoo ballet. Marvel has traditionally been smarter and more adept at making the best of its supporting cast than its rivals; who ever imagined Guardians of the Galaxy would make it to a trilogy in the pre-Avengers years? But we’ve also seen, with the likes of Eternals and The Marvels, that ensemble comic book flicks can quite easily wind up duller than watching paint dry while listening to a podcast about the history of staplers.
If the trailer for Thunderbolts* is anything to go by, it looks like our team of pepped-up antiheroes have been brought together by someone who’s not exactly pleased by what they’ve been up to over the past few years. All of which sort of begs the question: which Marvel power broker has enough time on their hands to stay up to date with the minor antics of a bunch of comic book also-rans, and actually care enough to get them together in order to tell them off.
Perhaps it’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Contessa, or Lewis Pullman’s apparently innocuous “Bob”, who is heavily hinted to transform into the Superman-level Marvel figure Sentry. Then again, it could be Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury, who’s always had an eye for avuncular criticism and an abiding disposition for pointing out when Marvel’s superheroes are completely wasting their Stan Lee-gifted talents.
Perhaps this is the secret of the future success of the Thunderbolts*. Come on Bucky! It’s time to be more than the guy with the one arm and the major mood swings who we’re all baffled is still out there, more than a decade after 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger. It’s time to show us why you should have been the leader of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes from the very beginning.
We’re told that the arrival of Thunderbolts*, which is due out next year, will mark the climax of Marvel’s Phase Five, which means the events of the film are likely to represent a pretty big deal – or at least a pertinent jumping-off point – in the run-up to the tantalising double-header that is 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday and the following year’s Avengers: Secret Wars. It’s quite possible that everyone involved – also rans or not – is about to get a serious levelling up.
The problem, of course, is that there are pretty good reasons why Marvel’s mainstays have been around for decades, while their sidekicks have always remained just that. To think otherwise is to imagine that Miss Moneypenny could effortlessly take on 007’s Walther PPK and stylish penchant for casual sexism in the absence of Her Majesty’s top secret agent, or that Salacious B Crumb might easily have wound up the leader of the Galactic Resistance if it hadn’t been for the quirks of the Force and that pesky Luke Skywalker. Still, at least they didn’t try to bring back Pip the Troll.
