By Erin Free
With the latest Marvel Studios release Thunderbolts* hitting standard blockbuster levels (as opposed to Deadpool & Wolverine-type levels), where will this team of unlikely anti-heroes land next?
Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Thunderbolts*…if you haven’t seen the flick, we suggest that you stop reading right the F now!
Though Thunderbolts* has not been the major, game-changing course-correct that many Marvel fans had hoped, it’s been received with adequate dollops of praise and appreciation, and sits as a definite tick in the Marvel Studios pro column, especially after misfires like The Marvels (a team-up that apparently nobody really wanted to see) and Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantomania, a two-hour exercise in world-building for a world that has now been thrown completely off its axis due to the ugly off-screen trespasses of actor Jonathan Majors. The gifted and charismatic actor was all set to take the throne as Marvel’s next Thanos-style bad guy, Kang, in two new Avengers movies, but will now scowl from the lower depths as one of the studio’s unfortunate footnotes, placed sourly alongside the likes of Edward Norton, Terrence Howard and Mickey Rourke.
Optimistically positioned as Marvel’s Phase 5 version of Guardians Of The Galaxy – a quirky, funny, largely-unknown-to-the-mainstream superhero team ingeniously mixing heartbreak with snarky humour – Thunderbolts* didn’t come close to hitting that high note. Its eponymous team of Marvel anti-heroes and, frankly, offcuts is certainly a lot of fun, but The Thunderbolts don’t have the instant indelibility of Star-Lord and his interstellar crew of loveable misfits. While director Jake Schreier (Robot & Frank, Beef) and writers Eric Pearson (who has worked on Black Widow and Thor: Ragnarök) and Joanna Calo (Beef, The Bear) certainly have chops, they aren’t in the same league as Guardians point-man James Gunn, who is currently top-of-the-tower at Warner Bros as overseer of the DC film slate. Side point: writer/director James Gunn also delivered quite possibly the most underrated major superhero flick yet with 2021’s quite remarkable kinda-sequel The Suicide Squad, which emerged from the ugly ashes of its studio-hacked, mishappen predecessor like a beautiful, hilarious, demented, pathos-rich phoenix.
But while not as mighty as Marvel had perhaps hoped, Thunderbolts* is very much in the studio’s future mix…but to what extent? As the climax of the film revealed – okay, this is your last chance to leave if you haven’t yet sampled the film’s energetic charms – the much discussed * is there in the film’s title because The Thunderbolts indeed experience a major rebranding courtesy of the duplicitous nouveau-Nick Fury, Valentina Allegra De Fontaine, played with entertaining sass by Julia Louis Dreyfus. As viewers have discovered with varying levels of shock and surprise (depending on how au fait they were with the circuitous narrative history of Marvel Comics), The Thunderbolts are now The New Avengers, a government-sanctioned team to take on the mantle of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. The scrappy nature of The Thunderbolts will likely see this as something of a running joke in The Marvel Cinematic Universe, with the team set to be placed as the pessimistic, snarling answer to the bigger names with whom they will share the screen.
And they will definitely be sharing the screen in Marvel’s upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, with all of the Thunderbolts* cast (Sebastian Stan, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Wyatt Russell, Hannah John-Kamen, Lewis Pullman) named in the very lengthy initial cast list for that 2026 blockbuster. But how much of a role will they play? In the fourteen-months-later end credits sequence of Thunderbolts*, we learn that The Thunderbolts/The New Avengers are involved in an IP legal battle with new Captain America Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) over the Avengers name. Via a sequence involving an unusual craft seen in a deep space transmission, we also witness the entry of Marvel favourites The Fantastic Four (Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, Ebon Moss-Bachrach) into The Marvel Cinematic Universe, zooming in from another multiverse dimension, with The Fantastic Four: First Steps set in a retro-futurist version of the 1960s far different to anything yet seen in The MCU.
The Thunderbolts will not be there for The Fantastic Four: First Steps (which will set up the characters in their own universe, before likely seeing them make their entrance into The MCU’s principal continuity in the film’s finale), but will make their return in 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday, which will establish resurrected Marvel godhead Robert Downey Jr. as major bad guy and comic book icon Doctor Doom. Rather than as a multiverse Tony Stark/Iron Man variant as some online commentators have tipped, our take is rather that Robert Downey Jr. will instead be pretty much unrecognisable in the role, courtesy of Doctor Doom’s trademark mask and a likely European accent, again per the comic book version of the character.
With the recent livestreamed cast announcement event for Avengers: Doomsday, the film is now being widely described as a team-up of The Avengers, Black Panther’s Wakandans, The Fantastic Four, The Thunderbolts/The New Avengers, Namor’s Kingdom of Talokan, and The X-Men in the face of an intergalactic threat put into place by Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom. With such a huge array of characters announced, however, we expect a big-time bait-and-switch from Marvel Studios. As disappointingly happened with Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster in Thunderbolts*, our tip is for another Janet-Leigh-in-Psycho situation here.
Our hunch? More than a few of these characters will only play a very, very small role in the film. Marvel Studios boss-man Kevin Feige has long touted the careful, precision introduction of comic legends The X-Men (famously absorbed into The MCU with Marvel’s parent company Disney’s purchase of X-Men-owning studio Fox), and we doubt very much that The X-Men proper will figure prominently via the Avengers: Doomsday announced cast of long-serving Fox mutants Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Kelsey Grammar, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and Alan Cumming. Along with Channing Tatum’s Gambit (first seen to hilarious effect in Deadpool & Wolverine), expect these multiverse versions of The X-Men to bow out very early in proceedings.
We expect The Thunderbolts/The New Avengers to either be utilised as similarly shock-ejected early-piece players, or to function merely as side players. In the first scenario, the weakly powered (unless they re-trigger Lewis Pullman’s fearsome but apparently nullified abilities as the terrifying Sentry) New Avengers get easily brushed aside by Doctor Doom, and then spend the rest of Avengers: Doomsday licking their wounds. In the second scenario, this band of misfits has to admit that they’re not really worthy of the title New Avengers and make way for a more legit team of Avengers. At this stage in proceedings, only Anthony Mackie’s Captain America, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man, Danny Ramirez’s Falcon and Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi have been announced for the film, along with Letitia Wright’s Black Panther and various Wakandans. That means we all have to wait for potential later announcements like Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk, Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlett Witch, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange, and Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, along with the possible inclusion of Marvel small screen Disney+ characters like She-Hulk, Daredevil, The Punisher, Echo, Ms. Marvel, Agatha Harkness, and others.
With either scenario, our tip is that The Thunderbolts/The New Avengers will remain on the sidelines…until they get their own sequel.
Click here for our Thunderbolts* review
