Marvel Reveals First “Thunderbolts” Trailer Unleashes the Bad Guys on the Worse Guys
We now have our first peek at Marvel Studios’ upcoming antihero team-up movie Thunderbolts.
The trailer opens with a family reunion—former Black Widow and all-around butt-kicker Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) arrives at the door of her father, Alexia Shostakov (David Harbour), better known as the Red Guardian. The last time we saw these two together was in Black Widow, the one and only stand-alone movie for Scarlett Johansson’s Avenger and former Black Widow herself, Natasha Romanoff. But Thunderbolts is set in a world bereft of Natasha after her sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame, and posits a whole new kind of super-team getting together. The Avengers these are not.
Yelena has come to tell her dad she feels empty, like she’s drifting without purpose, and even though she thought throwing herself into work was the answer—here we see Yelena doing what she does best, taking out whoever stands in her way—she still feels unfulfilled. That’s when she runs into not one but several bad guys and girls in a warehouse, including Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost (from the first Ant-Man), Olga Kurlyenko’s Taskmaster (from Black Widow), and Wyatt Russell’s John Walker (from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier). These antiheroes have been gathered, but why?
You can thank Julia Louis-Drefyus’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who has a firm belief that we’ve been misled in thinking the world is made up of good guys and bad guys. In her estimation, there are bad guys, like these newly assembled Thunderbolts, and there are worse guys. The bad guys are then, ipso fact, potential heroes.
Directed by Jake Schreier, Thunderbolts is the MCU’s first proper villains-own-the-day team-up flick, like what Warner Bros. had with The Suicide Squad, and comes from a script by Black Widow writer Eric Pearson. As Schreier told Collider last year, he was excited to take on something new in the MCU.
“It was just a really different approach and a new kind of story to tell amidst that, which I know they’ve made so many things, but it’s not a sequel. Yes, these characters have appeared before, but it is a new story being told and a story, I think, with a very different perspective than maybe people aren’t expecting, and I think that that felt exciting and felt like a real challenge worth taking on.”
Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige joked way back at D23 in 2022 when Thunderbolts was introduced that the team must be pretty rough around the edges when “beloved Winter Soldier is the most stable among them.”
Thunderbolts is due in theaters on May 2, 2025. Check out all the unstable would-be heroes in the trailer below:
For more stories on 20th Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios, and what’s streaming or coming to
Disney+, check these out:
Designed to Shred: How “Alien: Romulus” Costume Designer Carlos Rosario Stylized Horror
“Deadpool & Wolverine” Editors on Shaping Wolverine’s Masterpiece Emotional Explosion—in a Minivan
“Shōgun” Shows Up Big at Emmys, “The Bear” Gobbles Up 11
Featured image: (L-R): Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) in Marvel Studios’ THUNDERBOLTS*. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2024 MARVEL.
