New ‘Thunderbolts*’ Trailer Reveals Team Bonding And Suggests Their Opponent
by Erik Amaya
While this week’s Captain America: Brave New World and July’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps have a lot of the Marvel Studios faithful’s attention, there is one more movie from the superhero production house coming this year: Thunderbolts*. And as the trailer released during yesterday’s Big Game reveals, it is another group of unlikely misfits banding together to stop an impossible threat, but it’s not the team or tone you might expect.
As seen here, the Thunderbolts are a collection of not-heroes Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has been assembling on the periphery of Marvel television shows for a purpose she now lays bare in the preview. The Avengers are not coming to stop whatever dark, shadowy force is seemingly eating Manhattan. In the Avengers’ place: Buck Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour) — aka Red Guardian, Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen) — aka Ghost, Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) — aka Taskmaster, and John Walker (Wyatt Russell) — aka U.S.Agent. Early concept art and various rumors suggest there may yet be one or two more members on the team, but we’ll stick to the ones Disney and Marvel have declassified with this trailer.
Their mission: neutralize that shadowy presence. Or, at least, we think that’s their mission. The previous trailers suggested the group are press-ganged by Val into working together — but this trailer offers the notion that Bucky is all in on being part of this supergroup of low or no-powered ne’er-do-wells. And, honestly, that tone feels right to us. Like the Guardians of the Galaxy before them, this group of Thunderbolts are likable zeroes (sorry, Team Bucky boosters) and Marvel does have a knack for making those characters strangely beloved. Granted, people already love Bucky, Yelena, and Alexei.
The new trailer, though, also offers a slightly more serious tone even if the rendition of Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Know” used within it offers the feeling that tongue is firmly in cheek.
Does that mean this will be a fun romp? That remains to be seen. Every scrap of footage we saw at SDCC and D23 last year leaves us believing it’ll be our sort of movie, but the wider audience, already anticipating Superman and Fantastic Four this July, may wait until Thunderbolts* debuts on Disney+. It’s theatrical release is scheduled for May 2nd.
*according to studio president Kevin Feige, the asterisk in the title will be explained by the film’s end.
