Look: We know the first thing to go through our brains when the latest big trailer for a brand new Marvel movie drops shouldn’t be a fixation on punctuation. But can we just say how relieved we are that the new look at Marvel’s Thunderbolts*—dropped this afternoon at D23 Brazil—finally, kinda, addresses that stupid asterisk in the title? Marvel added the mark to the movie’s name a few months back, and it’s been irritating the hell out of us; from the trailer, it’s apparently just intended as a joke, denoting the black ops super-team’s overall rejection of the goofy name slapped on them by enthusiastic member Red Guardian. So that’s a relief.
With that important detail dispensed with, we’ll admit that the trailer itself is undeniably fun, teaming up several of the MCU’s more tarnished characters for a little black-ops espionage that shinier heroes wouldn’t touch. (If this sounds a little like DC’s Suicide Squad, well, that’s a criticism this version of Thunderbolts has been getting for like 20 years at this point in the comics.) Specifically, the trailer gets a lot of mileage out of the comic chemistry between Florence Pugh and David Harbour, who previously starred together in Black Widow, adding Wyatt Russell’s knock-off Captain America and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes into the banter-and-punching mix. (Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster and Hannah John-Kamen also reprise their roles as Taskmaster and Ghost from earlier Marvel projects, but since neither of them talk much, they don’t get quite as much ability to show off.) As with any trailer these days, there also has to be some kind of big, weird reveal, and this time it arrives in another look at Lewis Pullman as “Bob,” a guy who walks around in a hospital gown that has a suspicious number of bullet holes in it. (Marvel comics fans, of course, know exactly who he’s playing, and how dangerous he is; it’ll be interesting to see if this guy ends the film on the side of the angels or not.) Oh, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is serving as the Amanda Waller for the whole operation, running things from the former Avengers Tower. And there’s a bit where Pugh’s Black Widow blows up a building while carrying a guinea pig, which is pretty cute.
All told, it’s enough to have us tentatively optimistic for Thunderbolts*, which arrives in theaters on May 2, 2025.
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