The Thunderbolts* are getting striking new looks. Marvel’s Super Bowl trailer showed off the redesigned suits worn by the MCU’s most unconventional and dysfunctional team of antiheroes, which includes assassin Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), super-soldiers Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) and Red Guardian (David Harbour), spies Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and disgraced Captain America wannabe John Walker (Wyatt Russell).
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After the government-sanctioned Cap was dishonorably discharged during the events of 2021’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) recruited him to her team: an answer to the Avengers*. “Things are about to get weird. So when they do, we’re not gonna need a Captain America,” Val said of her black-clad, unsanctioned super-soldier. “We’re gonna need a U.S. Agent.”
RELATED: Marvel Studios Finally Reveals the Meaning of the Thunderbolts* Asterisk
“We look f—ing cool,” Russell told Empire Magazine. “And last time, I’m gonna be honest, I don’t think I looked very cool.” Walker acted like, well, a dickhead, so it was fitting that was what his first suit resembled. “[This time] they made my helmet not look like the end of a penis,” Russell added.
When Russell’s Walker stepped out in an ill-fitting Captain America costume in an episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, he told USA Today that wearing the star-spangled suit was “hot,” “very difficult,” “painful,” and, to keep up the penis comparisons, “stiff.”
That unorthodox description is appropriate, because the asterisk-titled Thunderbolts* isn’t your typical Marvel movie. The titular group is comprised of angsty antiheroes, assassins, spies, and washed-up super-soldiers, all connected by a common thread: redemption. As the synopsis states, “After finding themselves ensnared in a death trap set by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, these disillusioned castoffs must embark on a dangerous mission that will force them to confront the darkest corners of their pasts. Will this dysfunctional group tear themselves apart, or find redemption and unite as something much more before it’s too late?”
“It’s not a straightforward Marvel movie as you’ve seen in the past,” Russell teased during a 2023 panel. “I think that it’s gonna be a lot of fun but I think it will be something that, hopefully, Marvel fans will look at and go, ‘Oh OK, this is a little different, let’s go hard at it.’ And as far as how we are approaching it, it’s time to go to work a little bit, it’s time to make a good Marvel movie. So let’s do that and work hard at it and don’t take things for granted.”
Tell us what you think about the new Thunderbolts* suits in the comments below (or visit the ComicBook Panel), and see the MCU movie when it opens in theaters May 2.
