Thunderbolts
Thunderbolts is one of Marvel’s biggest upcoming MCU releases and brings together a number of characters from various films such as Black widow and Disney+ TV series like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier in Marvel’s version of The Suicide Squad.
The film stars David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko and Florence Pugh. The film will be released on May 2, 2025.
Disney showed a brand new trailer at SDCC last month that has now leaked online. I won’t post it here, but you can check it out on Twitter where it hasn’t been removed yet. The quality is pretty bad – a phone recording during the Hall H presentation – so I think it’s not a bad idea to wait. I can’t imagine Disney will hold off on the trailer for long now that it’s leaked, especially since the general response has been pretty positive from what I understand.
This is good news for Disney and Marvel after several years of failure in recent years. This trend ended with Deadpool and Wolverine, and if this trailer is any indication, we may be in for another MCU hit, although it’s obviously too early to say.
In the trailer, we see Pugh’s Yelena Belova/Black Widow meet David Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian. When I interviewed Harbour, he described the film as a story about Marvel’s “villains/losers,” which sounds pretty accurate. Later, Yelena gets into a fight with Wyatt Russell’s John Walker/US Agent and some mysterious masked opponents. Other notable moments include:
- The appearance of Robert “Bob” Reynolds, aka Sentry, a super-strong Marvel hero played by Lewis Pullman in Lightning. He seems confused by what is happening, which suggests that he is unaware of his true nature at this time.
- Bucky – aka Winter Soldier – played by Sebastian Stan; Julia Louis-Dreyfus in her role as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine; and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ava Starr / Ghost, who I had forgotten about since I hadn’t seen her. Ant-Man and the Wasp for ages and found it overall pretty forgettable.
The action looks like fun. The spy thriller plot seems pretty cool. And David Harbour seems to bring a lot of humor to the film. The focus on Pugh’s Black Widow in the lead role is also a smart choice, as she is a very likable character who is placed at the center of the ensemble. Hopefully we get a lot of US agents and Bucky too. And I’m definitely curious about those masked ninjas.
Before Thunderbolts will be released in May next year, we have a February release of Captain America: Brave New World which will also feature Harrison Ford’s Red Hulk, and before that we have Agatha all the time Landing on Disney Plus. This looks surprisingly good, and the first trailer quickly dispelled the many doubts I had about the show. A lot of antihero stuff, basically.
There is also a new season of Fortnite Landing later this week, featuring a number of Marvel characters from the X-Men and Fantastic Four including Doctor Doom and the worst Wolverine.
