It’s time to find out how your favorite visual effects in Thunderbolts* were brought to life. The film featuring a ragtag team of misfits from across the Marvel Cinematic Universe introduced fans to Bob, played by Lewis Pullman. His superhero alter ego is Sentry, who has a villainous side called The Void. Bringing these parts of Bob to the big screen took a team of visual effects experts, along with some of the other epic scenes in Thunderbolts*. A movie on the scale of an MCU blockbuster involves a lot of special effects, and a new video demonstrates how many of these scenes were rendered.
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ComicBook can exclusively reveal a Thunderbolts* visual effects breakdown video from Framestore. It begins with an outside shot of CIA Director Valentina Allegra De Fontaine’s secret vault, which is where the majority of the Thunderbolts* cast first meet each other. Of course, they’re sent to kill each other by Valentina, but they realize that later as they escape. Everything from the vault’s physical structure at the top of a mountain to the armed guards assembled to take out the Thunderbolts is digitally mastered.
We see how Ghost’s phasing abilities are created when she phases through the back of a jeep. Inside the Void, Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova busts through a wall and then plummets onto a table in a different room, with string wiring helping to break her fall. More scenes take place inside the Void, as Yelena and Bob are attacked by the items inside Bob’s room. A note in the reel explains how practical curtains on the set are replaced in CG for the final effect of Yelena and Bob being choked.
Back at the vault, we see the guards open fire on Bob, with wires whisking him high into the sky. Bob makes it above the clouds but passes out, falling fast and hard back down to Earth in a 100% CG environment. Finally, we end in a fully digital lab environment that was expanded, and ultimately destroyed, as the Thunderbolts battle the Void. Early FX tests show how the Void lab expands, along with the lab crumbling under the weight of Bob’s strikes against the Void. Yelena is able to escape her restraints and sprints to help Bob, bobbing and weaving through debris using parkour.
Thunderbolts* concluded with the big reveal that the asterisk in the title was to hide the team’s true name: The New Avengers. If you enjoyed Thunderbolts*, you’ll be happy to know the cast will return in Avengers: Doomsday, where the Avengers, New Avengers, Fantastic Four, and original X-Men cast battle Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom. The post-credits scene in Thunderbolts* sets up the events of Avengers: Doomsday, with the New Avengers spotting the Fantastic Four’s ship entering our dimension.
Thunderbolts* is available for rent or purchase digitally, and it will be available to stream on Disney+ sometime in August.
