Thunderbolts
Thunderbolts is one of Marvel’s biggest upcoming MCU releases, bringing together a number of characters from various films like Black Widow and Disney+ TV series like The Falcon and The Winter Soldier into Marvel’s version of The Suicide Squad.
The movie stars David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko and Florence Pugh and hits theaters on May 2nd, 2025.
Disney showed a brand new trailer at SDCC last month, and that trailer has now leaked online. I won’t post it here, but you can watch it on Twitter where it has yet to be taken down. It’s pretty lousy quality—a phone recording during the Hall H presentation—so I think waiting isn’t a bad idea. I can’t imagine Disney will sit on the trailer for long now that it’s leaked, especially because the general reception has been pretty positive as far as I can tell.
That’s welcome news for Disney and Marvel after quite a few busts in recent years. That trend came to an end with Deadpool & Wolverine, and if this trailer is anything to go by, we might have yet another MCU hit on our hands though it’s obviously far too early to tell.
In the trailer we see Pugh’s Yelena Belova / Black Widow meet up with 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 about right. Later, Yelena finds herself in a fight with Wyatt Russell’s John Walker / U.S. Agent and some mysterious masked opponents. Other notable bits include:
- The appearance of Robert “Bob” Reynolds, aka Sentry, a super powerful Marvel hero played by Lewis Pullman in Thunderbolts. He seems confused by what’s going on, which suggests he doesn’t realize his true nature at this juncture.
- Bucky—aka The Winter Soldier—played by Sebastian Stan; Julia Louis-Dreyfus reprising her role as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine; and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ava Starr / Ghost, who I forgot about since I haven’t seen Ant-Man and the Wasp in ages and found it pretty forgettable overall.
The action looks fun. The spy-thriller stuff seems pretty cool. And David Harbour looks like he’ll bring a lot of humor to the film. Focusing on Pugh’s Black Widow as the lead is savvy as well, as she’s a very likeable character to put at the center of the ensemble. Hopefully we get lots of U.S. Agent and Bucky also. And I’m definitely curious about those masked ninjas.
Before Thunderbolts lands in May of 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 Along landing on Disney Plus. That one looks surprisingly great, with the first trailer quickly erasing the many doubts I had about the show. Lots of antihero stuff, basically.
There’s also a new season of Fortnite landing later this week that brings in a bunch of Marvel characters from the X-Men and Fantastic Four including Doctor Doom and the very worst Wolverine.
