Marvel’s New ‘Thunderbolts’ Trailer Is Actually Fantastic

For reasons that remain totally inexplicable to me, Disney decided to wait a full month after a leaked copy of the first Thunderbolts trailer from SDCC circulated around the internet before finally putting the real one online.

The first trailer for Thunderbolts lets you now hear the actual audio and see it in more than 180p quality, and it is excellent, though how the film performs without true marquis heroes remains to be seen. But in the current state of the MCU, an genuinely great movie would go along way.

Thunderbolts will function as a sort of variation of DC’s Suicide Squad, minus the bombs in everyone’s heads. The roster we see in the trailer is:

• Yelena Belova
• Red Guardian
• Bucky Barnes
• Ghost
• Taskmaster
• US Agent

While the film may gloss over the finer points of their origins, to get the full backstory set-up here you should probably watch:

• Black Widow
• Ant-Man and the Wasp
• Every Captain America movie
• The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Disney has said they want viewers to need less backstory to watch new entries but uh, here, not so much maybe. The idea here is that these “bad guy” antiheroes are being assembled to take on a greater threat, which in this instance will be Sentry played by Lewis Pullman after Steven Yeun dropped out of the part. They are corralled by Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who has served as a sort of mirror world Nick Fury to assemble these team across a few projects now.

The film looks funny to be sure, but the action? The sequence where Yelena throws a knife and it bounces through everyone before making its way back to her is excellent. The same for every time we see Bucky in action.

The trailer very much positions Florence Pugh’s Yelena as the lead, which is probably a good idea since…Florence Pugh is amazing. Sebastian Stan’s Bucky looks to be a secondary lead before his storyline runs into theirs, but I think Yelena will still ultimately be running the team. Ghost and Taskmaster have both gotten questionable costume redesigns, and I have questions about who this Taskmaster actually is, given the events of Black Widow. I wonder if that will end up being a meaningful reveal.

I do not know how this movie will perform when Marvel’s box office is so all over the place these days, and this does not have Spider-Man, Deadpool or Wolverine in it. But if it’s good, that’s all I care about and this trailer does in fact look very good, and it seems most fans agree. Thunderbolts arrives in May 2025.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.