“Everyone deserves a second shot,” reads the tagline on a Wheaties-inspired poster (see it below) that accompanies the new Thunderbolts* Super Bowl trailer released during the big game. The team of Marvel misfits aspiring to be the heroes on the Wheaties cereal box includes depressed assassin Yelena Belova/Black Widow (Florence Pugh), former Hydra-brainwashed assassin Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), over-the-hill former Soviet super-soldier Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. spy Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), dishonorably discharged John Walker/U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), and the photo-reflexive former Red Room assassin Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko).
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The trailer teases redemption for the team of morally ambiguous anti-heroes, assassins, and reformed villains who have “done bad things,” admits Yelena: “Shadow ops, robbing government labs, contract kills.”
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“You can do something about it now,” Bucky tells the team of the big threat facing the so-called Thunderbolts*, “or live with it forever.” The footage reveals the Avengers-level threat to be Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman), the golden guardian with a dark side: the Sentry/the Void. It also hints that at least one member of the Thunderbolts* might not live to see their next Marvel team-up in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, and the casualty appears to be — potential spoiler warning ahead — Taskmaster.
The action-packed trailer shows U.S. Army Sergeant-turned U.S. congressman Barnes at a hearing with CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) before firing on a Humvee behind a car carrying Yelena, Alexei, Ava, and John. He then tells the tied-up quartet, “There’s some big threat out there, and you are going to help me stop it.”
This must happen after the basement battle between Yelena, Ava, John, and Antonia, who are all lured to a mysterious facility in the desert where Bob is being held prisoner (as seen in the first trailer). Not only is Taskmaster absent from the convoy and the recruiting scene with Barnes, but she briefly appears just twice: firing an exploding arrow at John’s shield, and again during the trailer-ending name montage (noticeably, in a shot that is also from the vault battle).
As it happens, moments earlier, the trailer shows Yelena, Ava, and John narrowly escaping the vault with Bob as it’s incinerated in a self-destruct sequence. Taskmaster isn’t shown making it out of the blast, and she doesn’t appear to be present at any of the set pieces featured throughout the trailer, including a standoff with a legion of armed agents and the Thunderbolts’ fight with Sentry inside Avengers Tower. She’s also conspicuously absent from the group shots, so it seems Taskmaster will be killed off before all the team building.
Jake Schreier (Paper Towns) directs Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts*, which is produced by Kevin Feige (Deadpool & Wolverine) and executive produced by Louis D’Esposito (Captain America: Brave New World), Brian Chapek (Thor: Love and Thunder), Jason Tamez (Loki), and Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow). The movie strikes theaters on May 2.
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