This article contains spoilers about Thunderbolts*.
Marvel’s Thunderbolts* isn’t actually called Thunderbolts*.
After almost a year of buildup, the latest MCU entry finally revealed what that mysterious asterisk in the title means, and it turns out that it’s a total rebrand for the dysfunctional team of misfits at its center. The director and stars tell Entertainment Weekly that the movie’s actual name will have a major impact on the MCU’s future.
During the surprisingly emotional action film, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes/the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), U.S. Agent/John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) take on the Thunderbolts name as a joke, in reference to Yelena’s terrible peewee soccer team (shout out to the girl who did a poo in the middle of one of their games). But after they save the day from Bob’s (Lewis Pullman) villainous alter ego, the Void, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) publicly takes credit for their success — and renames them against their will.
Fresh off their battle against the Void, the Thunderbolts are about to get their revenge on Val after she tried to kill them multiple times. But before they can arrest her, she lures the assassins-turned-heroes in front of live TV news cameras and announces that she has been working behind the scenes to build a new team of heroes in the absence of the Avengers.
Meet… the New Avengers. While the group decides to go along with it, Yelena whispers in Val’s ear, “We own you now.” The new name seems to stick, as the end credits rip the Thunderbolts* title card down to reveal the movie’s real name: New Avengers.
Marvel Studios
Julia Louis-Dreyfus in ‘Thunderbolts*’ … er, we mean ‘New Avengers’
Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier tells EW that renaming the movie and the group the New Avengers “was in the script from the very first draft.”
“Even though a lot of things, almost everything, changed around it,” the director says. “There was the core idea of these operatives sent to kill each other, which I thought was such a neat twist on people expecting Marvel’s Suicide Squad. And then that was the ending, and it went to a very different place, but that was the one thing that was like, no matter what we do, it’s going to end in that place.”
Thunderbolts* calls out the void (sorry) left by the Avengers many, many times throughout the movie, and Schreier says there were a lot of discussions about how to weave that meta idea about the larger MCU, for both the characters and the audience, into the story.
“Geraldine [Viswanathan’s Mel] has a line about, ‘I was in high school when the Avengers came,’ and she was, and I think a lot of people watching this will have been,” the director says. That’s why he wanted to include MCU “breadcrumbs” in the movie, like the Battle of New York gala or the Avengers Tower becoming the Watchtower.
“There’s these little hints, so that it doesn’t feel like a total left turn when [the name change] happens,” Schreier says. “And then also in the credits, in both of our post-credit sequences, acknowledging that this is not necessarily the most comfortable or perfect fit, and that it’ll be fun to watch how that goes going forward.”
But does this new title mean we should now be calling the movie New Avengers, and forget Thunderbolts* ever existed?
“If you want to [still] call it Thunderbolts*, that’s okay,” Schreier says. “The asterisk was part of my last pitch meeting before getting the job. I thought it would be a small thing — we should have one sign, put an asterisk on it, and say, ‘Until we come up with something better.’ And then they really ran with that and embraced that. And it felt like, at this studio, with the amount of attention on it, it’s a place where you could pull off something like that.”
While the director was excited about introducing the new name and title in the movie, the stars were a lot more anxious about being called the New Avengers. Or, in Russell’s own words, “Terrified. Terrified. Terrified.”
“Yeah, it was interesting,” Stan agrees. “Because it made me feel like, ‘Well, they’ll be very different than the previous ones,’ for one… It is actually an original movie in this space, and that’s what we’re excited about.”
But Russell repeats, “We were also terrified while we were doing it.”
Courtesy of Marvel Studios
Sebastian Stan in ‘Thunderbolts*’ … er, we mean ‘New Avengers’
Meanwhile, Pugh remembers hearing about the New Avengers title and thinking, “What’s the twist?” The actor thought it was just going to be another punchline about this unhinged group of chaotic antiheroes who struggle to work together, and not actually a real team name.
“Yeah, they’re going to say that, and maybe in the tag scene they’re like, ‘Nah, never mind,'” Pugh says with a laugh. “I was obviously really shocked, also because we’ve never seen these people work together before. Throughout the movie, there are winks and slight promises of them being able to work together, and it’s only really at the end that you’re like, ‘Oh, I can kind of see that happening,’ so I remember being as shocked when I read the Valentina line as Yelena was — all of them were.”
Once her initial surprise faded, Pugh began to realize the magnitude of what was happening with her Marvel character, who was just introduced in 2021’s Black Widow. “It’s a huge honor. It’s massive, oh my God,” she says. “It’s so thrilling to think that those at Marvel actually thought that that was a possibility and that they wanted to put us next to that. It is huge.”
Courtesy of Marvel Studios
David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, Wyatt Russell, and Florence Pugh
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The New Avengers — not just the name, but the actual group that decided to make it work together — also means a lot to Yelena on a personal level, especially after the mental health journey she went through in this movie. “It’s probably keeping her alive,” Pugh says of working with a team. “It’s given her purpose. Being a part of that, being a part of that family, having people to rely on, and for them to rely on her has kept her alive. It’s allowed her to feel loved again.”
As for what this means for Val, it’s harder to say. The manipulative CIA director was facing impeachment at the start of the movie due to her shadowy, extremely illegal practices, which were ultimately exposed. However, publicly taking ownership of the New Avengers gives her a new life (figuratively and, for some very angry team members still seeking revenge, quite literally). And while Louis-Dreyfus isn’t one of the confirmed Avengers: Doomsday cast members, the actor feels “positive” about returning to the MCU in the future.
“Well, I certainly hope so, and I can’t really say,” she tells EW. “I’m not at liberty to say, but I know that anything is possible, and I’m up for more play in the Marvel universe at any moment. I stand at the ready.”
More Val in the MCU is always a good thing — we’re just not sure if that’s good or bad for the New Avengers.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
