Marvel Studios didn’t plan for Thunderbolts* to end Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It wasn’t until screenwriter Eric Pearson, a longtime Marvel script doctor who wrote 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok and 2021’s Black Widow, pitched a sort of spinoff reuniting Widow‘s Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), and Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) alongside other MCU castoffs like John Walker (Wyatt Russell) from the 2021 TV series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), not seen since 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp.
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Just like Thunderbolts*, which ends with CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) suddenly rebranding the titular team as the New Avengers, it was another higher-up who suggested that last-minute name change: Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige.
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“That was a Kevin thing. I told him I wanted to do a Thunderbolts movie and the way in was going to be through Yelena bringing them together against Valentina,” Pearson told The Hollywood Reporter. “I tried one pitch that didn’t work, and the second pitch was very, very close to the movie that we have now. I ended the pitch with Yelena whispering in Valentina’s ear, ‘You work for us now,’ essentially. So I pitched that Valentina is forced to introduce the Thunderbolts [to the public], and Kevin said, ‘I think that she should call them the Avengers.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa, okay!’”
“That was his one big note from the pitch, and when you get one note from a Marvel pitch, you get out of there,” he continued. “So I was like, ‘Okay, cool. I don’t know what your plan is for the New Avengers.’ And then there were many, many discussions: ‘Capital N? Lowercase n? Are they Avengers that are new? Are they the New Avengers?’ But that was Kevin’s idea, and it’s part of some four-dimensional chess plan that I don’t totally know yet.”
Having the Thunderbolts* asterisk indicate “*The New Avengers,” as revealed by a movie-ending title card, also comes with another asterisk: Anthony Mackie’s Captain America is revealed to be in a trademark dispute with Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes.
In a scene taken from next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, a post-credits sequence set 14 months after the events of Thunderbolts* brings the Fantastic Four to Earth just moments after Yelena learns from Bucky that Sam Wilson has staked a claim on the Avengers name.
“The asterisk came later as well. In my drafts of the script, there was always the peewee Thunderbolts [soccer] team; that was where the name came from,” Pearson said, referring to Yelena’s childhood soccer team that inspired the group’s short-lived name. “We were obviously not doing Thunderbolt Ross [Red Hulk, Harrison Ford’s Captain America: Brave New World villain]. But the asterisk was a thing that I saw later when they were in production, and I was just like, ‘That’s really cheeky, and I like it.’”
Pearson also noted that Marvel Studios didn’t have any plans to make a movie about the Thunderbolts, who debuted in 1997 as a team of supervillains masquerading as heroes in the absence of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four.
“Marvel didn’t really have a plan for a Thunderbolts movie. I brought it to them, but I was thinking that, having had the pleasure to meet Florence on Black Widow and write the first Yelena Belova stuff and work with her to build that character, with her doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there,” Pearson said. “She’s incredible, and I knew that she was someone who could carry a movie like this. I didn’t want to go in saying, ‘Let’s hide a Yelena movie in a team-up movie.’ I wanted it to be a team.”
He continued, “The Avengers had the centerpiece of Tony Stark and Captain America, and the duality of those guys at the lead. For the Thunderbolts and the way that I wanted to view these team members and the themes of the movie, it felt like Yelena was a natural leader. I’m not sure if this comparison is fully baked, but the idea is that she’s Michael Corleone and Bucky is Tom Hagen [in The Godfather]. That’s the way that I see it.”
Thunderbolts* / *The New Avengers is now playing only in theaters.
