Key Takeaways
- Thunderbolts* is an audacious MCU project with leaked footage generating excitement among fans.
- The official trailer reveals a team of antiheroes facing a common enemy and hints at a complex plot.
- The upcoming Thunderbolts* film is highly anticipated and expected to be a positive addition to the MCU.
Thunderbolts* has been the most well-received of the upcoming projects slated for 2025 within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and fans have finally gotten a good look at the titular team and the curious predicament that converges their disparate interests with stellar new footage.
Thunderbolts* has been an audacious undertaking since the very beginning of its conceptualization. First brought to the table in 2014 by then MCU-bound filmmaker James Gunn, the idea for bringing the Marvel comics team to the big screen franchise was okayed by studio boss Kevin Feige after the success of Guardians of the Galaxy. However, Gunn would be uninterested in bringing the idea to life when it was finally brought to the fore in 2021 thanks to his work on DC’s The Suicide Squad, as the teams had a very similar premise. Fans would share this misgiving when a rumored plot for the Thunderbolts* project was revealed with a marked similarity to what the competition had offered up already.
These concerns would subside for some when new details on Thunderbolts* emerged following a leaked trailer from San Diego Comic Con, and now the studio has finally released an official trailer for the upcoming film with all the information adn intrigue fans have been waiting for. Posted to the official Marvel Entertainment YouTube channel, the trailer opens with Flourence Pugh’s Yelena making a house call to David Harbour’s Red Guardian, opening up about a significant crisis of purpose that she’s been experiencing despite throwing herself into heer work. The trailer shows others beset by this same feeling, showing glimpses of this; Red Guardian’s squalid and sedentary apartment living, Wyatt Russell’s John Walker living in a suburban doldrums, and even Sebastian Stan’s Bucky navigating the government. Things start to take shape when Walker and Yelena find themselves going head-to-head in some secret facility before Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost and Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster join the fray and the antiheroes realize that someone wants them gone. The premise thus presented, the trailer finally gives fans the main players assembled, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine making an on-screen appearance and providing a voiceover line that sums up the group’s vibe perfectly.
We’re brought up with this belief that there are good guys and there are bad guys. But eventually, you come to realize that there are bad guys and there are worse guys. And nothing else.
The trailer does a great job of actually presenting the film’s main plot and the characters in a compelling way, but it also has a few other touches that are both interesting and important. The reveal of Lewis Pullman’s character Bob was a fleeting but important part of the trailer, with the seemingly timid and unsuspecting bystander getting caught up in the fighting and being shown to be bulletproof, all but confirming rumors that he’s actually the MCU’s Sentry, a character that is in many ways Marvel’s Superman. While Steven Yeun’s exit from the Sentry role was an unfortunate setback for the MCU, Pullman seems set to provide a solid performance of the complex character. Elsewhere, the general light MCU touch is present in the banter between the characters and moments like Bucky pulling his bionic arm out of a dishwasher.
Everything about the Thunderbolts* trailer seems to be just right, from the unique yellow Marvel Studios logo to the action sequences and the characters chosen for the ensemble. The trailer gives off the same grounded, intrigue-laden feel that Captain America: Brave New World was finally able to get to shine through after extensive reshoots and releasing its own trailer, and that’s a credit to the project. There’s little else fans might want to see before the film releases in May following Brave New World’s Valentine’s Day date with moviegoers, but there are a ton of expectations surrounding the upcoming film. The most prominent of these that the trailer probably won’t answer is whether or not Thunderbolts* will be the sendoff for Bucky Barnes, as the Winter Soldier becomes more and more a symbol of Avengers past in need of something close to a happy ending.
While the trailer did the same things that Marvel’s SDCC presentation did by not revealing the meaning behind the asterisks (and even taking the time to add it in with some fanfare in the post-roll title card), this trailer has already been received significantly well as indicated by a large number of likes on the upload as opposed to the negligible dislikes. While there’s still quite some time before the film hits theaters, and a lot can happen in that time, there’s no reason not to be optimistic about Thunderbolts* being able to give fans the sort of positive experience that the core MCU franchise has been pining for since the second half of 2023.
Thunderbolts* is set for theatrical release in May 2025.
