With Captain America: Brave New World mere days away, Marvel Studios are already ratcheting up the promotion for Jake Schreier's upcoming MCU joint Thunderbolts*, which is set to see Earth's mightiest anti-heroes team up, The Suicide Squad style, to face a mysterious threat. Well, perhaps not quite so mysterious any more. After months of speculation, the latest trailer for the movie — which just dropped during the Super Bowl — seems to confirm just who exactly Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Red Guardian (David Harbour), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and their fellow under appreciated ne'er-do-wells (Wyatt Russell's John Walker, Olga Kurylenko's Taskmaster, and Hannah John-Kamen's Ghost) will be squaring up against.
Yeah, we don't know about you guys but, as fans have been speculating, perhaps we’re about to find out exactly what/who Lewis Pullman’s Bob really is. On the whole, this latest look at Dark Aven— we mean, er, Thunderbolts*, offers up more of what the first two trailers gave us — Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Valentina Allegra de Fontaine saying the Avengers have gone AWOL, assembling her morally compromised team, and then sparks flying between them as they learn to work together. All of which, might we add, is still looking great (every moment spent with Red Guardian is a moment we treasure). But where this spot breaks from its predecessors is in actually offering a peek at what — or, more accurately, who — Yelena and co have been looking up to the sky fearfully at all this time. And the lone, imposing figure with a mass of long, dark hair looking back at 'em could yet prove to be Pullman's elusive ‘Bob'. Now, grab some salt and pinch it real good, but it’s not a huge stretch to get from Bob to Robert Reynolds, the real name of schizoid supe with the power of a million-exploding-suns Sentry — essentially Marvel's answer to Superman. And if we are about to see Sentry’s debut in the MCU and you want to get real technical (which we always do), then it could well be that the Thunderbolts will be teeing up a meeting with Reynolds' comic book dark alter ego, The Void — aka the malevolent embodiment of all the evil and darkness within Reynolds. TL;DR version — our new favourite superteam are in a whole heap of trouble, and it’s looking increasingly likely that ‘Bob’ is said trouble’s root.
Can the Dark Aven— dammit, the Thunderbolts, set aside their differences and get their gun-toting, non-superpowered act together? Is the balance of power in the Marvel Cinematic Universe about to shift with the arrival of Sentry/The Void? Is that speculation merely a red herring? Will any actual Avenger show up at all to prove Valentina wrong? And, for the love of Feige, what is the deal with the asterisk? We'll find out when Thunderbolts* hits cinemas on 2 May. In the meantime... Alexa, play 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now' by Starship.
