The Bad Guys Assemble in Meaty “Thunderbolts” Super Bowl Trailer
Marvel’s antiheroes unleashed a new trailer during Sunday night’s Super Bowl (in which the Philadelphia Eagles decimated the Kansas City Chiefs). The Super Bowl trailer for Marvel’s Thunderbolts is set to Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” with Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova/Black Widow feeling a lot less confident then we’ve seen her in the past. In fact, she needs her fellow ‘Bolts to give her a pep talk and get her head back in the game.
“We can’t do this. No one here is a hero,” Yelena says, but her dear old dad, David Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian, has some wisdom for her: “Yelena, when I look at you, I don’t see your mistakes. That’s why we need each other.”
The Thunderbolts team is made up of Pugh’s Black Widow butt-kicker, her dad, the Red Guardian, and a slew of Marvel villains who have just enough moral flexibility to do good. Or, at least, be a little better than the even worse guys. Those include Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (although to be fair, he’s been a good guy for a while now), 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).
So, who assembled this bad dream team? You can thank Julia Louis-Drefyus’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who believes that the world is not made up of good guys and bad guys, a very pedestrian and naive way to look at things. In her sage estimation, there are bad guys, like our Thunderbolts, and there are worse guys. The bad guys are then, ipso facto, potential heroes. The worse guys need to be dealt with.
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.
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 Super Bowl trailer below:
For more on Thunderbolts, check out these stories:
Marvel Reveals First “Thunderbolts” Trailer Unleashes the Bad Guys on the Worse Guys
Florence Pugh Plays By Her Own Rules in Set Video From Marvel’s “Thunderbolts”
Marvel Studios’ “Thunderbolts” Eyeing “Top Gun: Maverick” Star Lewis Pullman for Big Role
Featured image: (L-R) Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), and Red Guardian/Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour) in Marvel Studios’ THUNDERBOLTS*. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2024 MARVEL.
