[Warning: This article contains Thunderbolts* spoilers.] “Careful who you assemble.” That’s the tagline for Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts*, which doesn’t reveal the meaning of the asterisk and the actual title of the movie until just before the credits roll: The New Avengers. Unlike the original team of Earth’s mightiest heroes assembled by Nick Fury’s Avengers Initiative, the “New Avengers” are formed by fate when they’re brought together by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine’s (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) plot to eliminate “loose ends” — Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), and Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko).
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Dreykov’s Taskmaster is killed early on, and the so-called Thunderbolts go on to join forces with Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), who then add Val’s pet project, Bob Reynolds/Sentry (Lewis Pullman), to their ranks. By movie’s end, the sextet are renamed the “New Avengers” by an opportunistic Val, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe has its first major team since the Avengers disassembled in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.
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But Marvel Studios veteran scribe Eric Pearson tells ComicBook that early versions of the Thunderbolts* movie included Laurence Fishburne’s Bill Foster, Ava’s adoptive father and Hank Pym’s former partner on Project G.O.L.I.A.T.H. from 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Red Hulk, the rampaging alter-ego of Harrison Ford’s U.S. President Thaddeus Ross.
“I don’t think there was anybody I asked for that we didn’t get. There was a point where I wanted Red Hulk to be the villain and [Marvel Studios] said, ‘No,’” Pearson said, nodding to the Red Hulk’s inclusion as a third-act villain in February’s Captain America: Brave New World. “I was annoyed and now I’m happy. The Sentry is the perfect person [for the villain role]. Any time you think you have it figured out and they tell you that you can’t do it, you are annoyed.”
Pearson shared that “there was a draft or two where Bucky was not involved, and there was a draft or two where Bill Foster was involved.”
“Ava’s surrogate father, he comes in with [a role] bigger than a cameo and has a Goliath kind of moment and joins the team towards the end,” Pearson revealed, referencing Bill Foster’s superhero alter-ego. (In the comics, Foster synthesized the original Ant-Man’s Pym Particles to become Goliath, the giant-sized counterpart of Pym’s Giant-Man.)
“I think there was something with two old guys, [Foster] and [Alexei], who are not exactly fathers, but acting as fathers,” Pearson said of Alexei’s relationship with Yelena. “I forget why that was pulled out. Probably because he didn’t have the same background trauma that these other characters had, which was the unifying theme.”
Director Jake Schreier wanted to include Man-Thing — a supernatural character who served as part of Luke Cage’s Thunderbolts team alongside the original Ghost — and Baron Zemo, the original team leader who first formed the Thunderbolts when Zemo’s Masters of Evil masqueraded as superheroes.
“Jake was very excited about doing Man-Thing. The other one was Zemo. ‘Let’s get Zemo in there,’” Pearson recalled. “We talked about it a lot. It wasn’t, ‘No, let’s deny the audience these people or deny our director this character that he wanted to use.’ It was more like, ‘Let’s talk about it and find a way that doesn’t break the story we are trying to tell.’”
Ultimately, Daniel Brühl’s Baron Zemo — the string-pulling villain who disassembled the Avengers in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, only to return in 2021’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier series on Disney+ — didn’t fit into the story of a group of what Ava refers to as “disposable delinquents.”
“What was very important to me is I found a story that wasn’t just a rehash of [DC’s] Suicide Squad,” Pearson explained. “We have had two Suicide Squad movies recently and the last thing I wanted to do was, ‘Hey, we are going to put a team together.’ Not because it’s a bad story, but it’s just because it is a story audiences are familiar with. They sit in there and say, ‘Oh, I know the moves of this story.’”
Man-Thing, who was previously bookmarked for the Special Presentation Werewolf by Night, also didn’t quite fit in with this version of the team.
“Man-Thing, being an agent or some evidence that Valentina wanted to destroy… He is such an unpredictable creature. It kinda didn’t fit and we couldn’t figure out a way that made sense,” Pearson explained. “And you look at Man-Thing and you are like, ‘What the hell is that?’ We already had Bob, who was, ‘What the hell is that?’ If you are dealing with Bob, why the hell is this normal-looking guy here versus this swamp monster? You are going to spend a lot of your time looking at the swamp monster as opposed to Bob, who needed a lot of attention because we needed to use that real estate between Bob waking up and Bob realizing he is the strongest thing that exists in the universe.”
“That’s when you get to know the real Robert Reynolds, the one who has all this baggage and is trying to be a good person, but is held down by all his negative thoughts before he becomes too powerful,” he continued of Bob’s alter-ego, the villainous Void.
Zemo, Goliath, and Red Hulk have all served as members of the Thunderbolts in the comics. Zemo’s original Thunderbolts included Atlas (the superhero alter-ego of Erik Josten, formerly the villain known as Goliath), and Thaddeus Ross’ Red Hulk led a new version of the team in 2012’s Thunderbolts volume 2.
Along with the Red Hulk, the lethal team of operatives included the Punisher, Elektra, Venom, and Deadpool. Man-Thing went on to join the team under the leadership of the Avenger Luke Cage, who also recruited members of the original Thunderbolts team — reformed supervillains Songbird, MACH-V, Fixer, and Moonstone — plus the original Ghost, Brock Rumlow/Crossbones, and Cain Marko/Juggernaut.
Marvel’s Thunderbolts* is now playing in theaters.
