Marvel Studios reveals the members of the House of Ideas’ Suicide Squad, with Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan and David Harbour among the best-known names. This is what ‘Thunderbolts’ will look like.
Marvel continues to build the future of its Cinematic Universe with Thunderbolts, the already announced film in which Florence Pugh will be the main lead and star. At Disney’s D23 Expo, where we learned more about Secret Invasion. This new movie focused on the craziest superheroes, outsiders or supervillains will arrive on July 26th, 2024 with the direction of Jake Schreirer. Now we have the full line-up.
The new ensemble will have Pugh as Yelena Belova, the half-sister of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), who will play the leader of the ensemble. An ensemble led by a sort of Nick Fury, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who will be brought back to life by Julia Louis-Dreyfus after several previous appearances in Marvel Cinematic Universe series.
As rumoured, Sebastian Stan will return as Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier, with Aleksei Shostakov (aka Red Ranger) reappearing under the talents of David Harbour. He is joined by Ava Starr (Ghost with Hannah John-Kamen after appearing in Ant-Man and the Wasp) and Antonia Dreykov (Taskmaster, voiced by Olga Kurylenko).
Joining them will be John Walker (Wyatt Russell), who after his stint as Captain America, was eventually reborn as US. Agent. Although it hasn’t been revealed, nor is it in the official artwork, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Daniel Brühl’s Baron Zemo, the original founder of the team in the Marvel comics.
. In case you’re unfamiliar, The Thunderbolts first appeared in the comics back in the 1990s, telling the story of a group of supervillains under government supervision, some of them reformed from prison, who carry out a series of missions for the government.
After the release of Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel Universe has continued to show affection for superheroic groupings, as evidenced by Eternals and the development of Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 as the finale to James Gunn’s trilogy.
However, these films have the particularity that their characters have always come in droves: they are not, as every Avengers film was, a crossover bringing together characters from other corners of the MCU.
At last Comic-Con Kevin Feige announced that Phase 6 would conclude in 2025 with two Avengers films, but we still don’t know who they would be: Avengers: The Kang Dynasty (directed by Destin Daniel Cretton) and Avengers: Secret Wars will close the Multiverse Saga.
But they won’t be the only major crossover, as Thunderbolts was confirmed in parallel. This is an alternative grouping of anti-heroes united in a common cause, in the style of DC’s Suicide Squad. As it was announced that Jake Schreirer (Paper Towns) would direct and the film was set for release on 26 July 2024, with the responsibility of ending Phase 5 on a high note, the ground was ripe for speculation. Who would be the members of this group? It soon became clear that one of them would be the Yelena Belova played to great applause by Florence Pugh in Black Widow, to reprise the character in the Hawkeye series.
Lucía Domínguez