The Avengers are dead (so to speak). Long live the New Avengers.
Early in Thunderbolts*, shadowy intelligence agency director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) says: “The Avengers aren’t walking through that door”.
Indeed, it’s been a while since the Avengers appeared together — the last time being in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, which closed out Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). While individual Avenger members have popped up in Phases 4 and 5, we haven’t seen the core members interacting as a group for a while.
Unsurprisingly, many fans have felt that the MCU has lacked direction since Endgame. Recent MCU films and TV shows seem to have less of a hold on the public than they used to.
With marquee heroes like Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) ostensibly bowing out and the core Avengers team splintering, the MCU has felt a little unmoored. Thunderbolts*, the final Phase 5 movie, smartly leans into this by pushing its second-string superheroes — or rather, antiheroes — to the forefront, embracing its B-team’s B-team-ness from the get-go.
It’s a fun twist, then, that it is Hollywood A-lister Florence Pugh who headlines the movie. She reprises her role as former black widow Yelena Belova, who has been hired by Allegra to conduct black ops missions. Yelena is feeling unfulfilled as her latest assignment takes her to Malaysia, where she uncovers a top-secret experimental project that Allegra is running.
On a mission, Yelena encounters Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), John Walker/US Agent (Wyatt Russell), and Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). They realise they have been set up by the duplicitous Allegra, who is trying to conceal her involvement in the mysterious Project Sentry. The ragtag group meets Bob (Lewis Pullman), a test subject with no memory. Along the way, Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) and Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour) join the fray, and the dysfunctional team must stick together to face a terrifying opponent.
As it explores the vacuum left by the Avengers and how the MCU’s heroes and antiheroes will move forward, Thunderbolts* becomes a surprising meditation on mental health, found family, and purpose. “We really wanted [the characters] to find their connection points through struggle,” director Jake Schreier tells Tatler Asia. “The ways they might’ve gone down the wrong path in isolation but maybe become something bigger together.” Fans have drawn comparisons between the Thunderbolts and another beloved dysfunctional MCU team, the Guardians of the Galaxy.
[Spoilers ahead!]
Of course, Thunderbolts* isn’t just about its characters getting all navel-gazey. The movie’s action sequences feel more practical than those of other MCU entries, with the marketing emphasising that a good deal of the movie was shot on location. The spectacular opening showcases Yelena leaping off the Merdeka 118 tower, the second-tallest building in the world, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Then there’s a car chase shot in the expansive Utah desert, featuring exploding cars and a shotgun-toting Bucky saving the day astride his motorcycle. The movie’s climactic action sequence, in which the team faces off against a dark entity called the Void, is haunting and trippy.
Said climactic sequence takes place in New York, in similar locations to the big battle at the end of The Avengers (2012). That’s one of several ways in which Thunderbolts* deliberately invokes that movie to make a point about how the MCU will move forward in its defining team’s absence, and who might take their place. Allegra attends an exhibition of artefacts from the Chitauri invasion in that film, and she also buys the now-vacant Avengers Tower, renaming it the Watchtower, to serve as her headquarters. Shots of the Thunderbolts in New York are also meant to echo those of the Avengers in that movie.
These allusions are intentional — as the movie ends, the Thunderbolts rebrand as the ‘New Avengers’, explaining the asterisk in the movie’s title. Marvel Studios marketed the movie under this title after its opening weekend, amending billboards to replace ‘Thunderbolts*’ with ‘The New Avengers’. This sets up a conflict between the team and Sam Wilson/Captain America (Anthony Mackie), who is reassembling an Avengers team himself. The movie’s post-credits scene further sets the stage for what’s coming next.
Thunderbolts* strikes a chord with viewers thanks to its frank and vulnerable approach to themes of mental health and our need for connection. In a genre where surprises are scarce, there’s enough about Thunderbolts* that’s different and enough that’s familiar, pulling fans back into the MCU just in time for the franchise’s next milestone. Most of the members of the Thunderbolts (sorry, the New Avengers) will return in Avengers: Doomsday, which will open in December 2026.
After being ensnared in a death trap, an unconventional team of antiheroes assembles and embarks on a dangerous mission...
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