If you’re not the type of sicko who hunts down the leaked, illicility recorded trailers that premiere at San Diego Comic-Con or Disney’s D23, good news: Your first look at Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts* is here. And if you have no idea what a Thunderbolt is — or why there’s an asterisk there — I can answer part of that: It’s kind of Marvel’s version of the Suicide Squad, a collection of former heroes and former villains assembled to handle a super-powered threat.
As the first (very fun) teaser trailer for Thunderbolts* reveals with its generous three-minute runtime, Yelena Belova/White Widow (Florence Pugh) reunites with father figure Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian, then collides with U.S. Agent/John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost/Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster/Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko), and the Winter Soldier/Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) to form an Avengers-like team. The threat? It might be Bob (Lewis Pullman). It might be Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Or it might be something else, because the Thunderbolts* trailer doesn’t really get into who Bob really is: one of Marvel Comics’ most powerful superheroes, who harbors a dark secret.
De Fontaine has been covertly assembling this group of castoffs and misfits over the past few years, as seen in Marvel Cinematic Universe fare like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Black Widow. Now she’s getting the whole gang together to handle the worst kind of bad guy there is. And it looks like she might have some really nice real estate with which to enact her plan. (That is Avengers Tower, right?)
Marvel’s Thunderbolts* is directed by Jake Schreier and written by Eric Pearson, Lee Sung Jin, and Joanna Calo. The fact that many of those people helped create the fantastic TV series Beef is a harbinger of good things.
Thunderbolts* will hit movie theaters in May 2025. By that point, we’ll probably have learned why there’s an asterisk in the title.
