Florence Pugh’s Black Widow Might Return in Marvel’s Thunderbolts

Marvel’s Thunderbolts may have enlisted its first member: Florence Pugh’s Black Widow. Jake Schreier (Robot and Frank, Netflix’s Beef) has reportedly signed on to direct the Thunderbolts movie for Marvel Studios, with Black Widow‘s Eric Pearson writing and Kevin Feige producing. According to TheWrap reporter Umberto Gonzalez, Pugh may return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the project about a team of reformed supervillains. In the 1990s Marvel comics, Captain America enemy Baron Zemo founded the Thunderbolts as a team of supervillains posing as superheroes. 

The Midsommar and Don’t Worry Darling actor joined the MCU in Black Widow, portraying an assassin trained by Russia’s Red Room and the adoptive sister of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson). Pugh first reprised her role as Yelena Belova in the Marvel Studios Original series Hawkeye on Disney+. 

A potential Thunderbolts roster could include US Agent (Wyatt Russell, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko, Black Widow), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen, Ant-Man and the Wasp), The Abomination (Tim Roth, The Incredible Hulk), and Baron Zemo (Daniel Brühl, Captain America: Civil War) and the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), who were forced to team up in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Marvel Back Issues: The Thunderbolts Strike for Justice Like Lightning

In the comics, the original team of Thunderbolts are revealed to be the supervillain group the Masters of Evil: Citizen V (Baron Zemo), Techno (Fixer), Mach-1 (Beetle), Songbird (Screaming Mimi), Atlas (Goliath), and Meteorite (Moonstone). A recent version of the team was led by Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, in 2016’s Thunderbolts. 

In a 2021 interview with ComicBook, Pugh teased Yelena’s future as the new Black Widow of the MCU after Natasha’s sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame. 

“Going forward, I think the most wonderful thing and the scary thing is that, obviously, I’ve got major shoes to fill. It’s just been really wonderful seeing all the ways that Scarlett’s changed conversation about her character,” Pugh said. “And I think for me, whatever future there is, I would love to, I suppose, follow in her footsteps in that way. How do we make Yelena different, how do we make her stand out? How do we make her powerful? And that’s going to be an ongoing, I hope, conversation. Yeah, I suppose follow in Scarlett’s footsteps in that way, changing it.”