[Warning: This article contains Thunderbolts* spoilers.] When Earth’s mightiest heroes assembled for the first time to defend New York City against a Thanos-sent alien invasion in 2012’s The Avengers, there was no Spider-Man (Tom Holland) swinging around Queens, no Daredevil (Charlie Cox) on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, and no sorcerer Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in New York’s Sanctum Sanctorum on Bleeker Street. But by the time the Thunderbolts the New Avengers assemble for the first time at the Watchtower — the renamed Avengers Tower — in Midtown Manhattan, New York City is crawling with superheroes.
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Spider-Man, Daredevil, and Doctor Strange are all active by the time Thunderbolts* takes place in 2027, but the just-formed Thunderbolts — Yelena Belova/Black Widow (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), John Walker/U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) — are the only heroes on hand to save the city from the Void, the villainous manifestation of the Sentry’s (Lewis Pullman) dark side.
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“I’m going to take the fifth on that one,” screenwriter Eric Pearson told ScreenRant when asked about the absence of New York’s superheroes. “I haven’t looked at the map closely enough of where it went. I’m not sure if it went to Bleecker Street yet.”
The third act of Thunderbolts* is largely set in the Void, an all-encompassing blackness that transports people into a sort of shadow realm where they relive their worst traumas.
“I also think that the time of it is happening so much faster than you expect,” Pearson said of the Void overtaking portions of New York City. “That expansion and retraction of time is different. As we say in Thor: Ragnarok, ‘Time works real different around here.’ When you’re in the Void Space, who knows how long it’s been? Maybe it’s been one second.”
Pearson — a Marvel Studios veteran scribe who went through Marvel’s writers’ program before penning the scripts for Thor: Ragnarok, Black Widow, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps — wrote Thunderbolts* on spec and conceived the story, which at one time had the Red Hulk as the villain before a breakthrough led to Sentry: a mentally ill character whose split psyche created the heroic Sentry and villainous Void personas.
“When I was in the Marvel Writers’ Program in 2010 and 2011, you read a bunch of stuff. One of the things that I read was a Sentry comic,” Pearson explained to ComicBook in our exclusive interview. “We had tried a couple of versions of the Thunderbolts* script where I always knew I wanted this thing to end with a hug, with a villain they cannot defeat.”
“Ultimately, they are not that spectacular in their powers,” he continued. “That is not what makes them special. So, there is a physical villain they cannot beat. I wanted them to have an emotional breakthrough and end it with a hug.”
Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts* *The New Avengers is now playing only in theaters.
