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This article contains major spoilers, so do not read if you have not watched Thunderbolts*. There was always something deeply suspicious about that asterisk, and now the word is out. If you’ve been to see it during the past week, you’ll know that the motley crew of antiheroes and sometime superheroes led by Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova and David Harbour’s Red Guardian may well be the New Avengers.
The problem is that even with the cat out of the proverbial bag, there’s something off here. First of all, the Avengers are supposed to be Earth’s mightiest heroes, a crew of idealists and icons who are never happier than when punching the likes of Thanos in the face and delivering heartfelt monologues about sacrifice and teamwork. The Thunderbolts*? They’re the last people you’d call if you were being invaded by Chitauri, Ultron, or even a moderately aggressive Roomba. This bunch of emotionally unstable grudge-holders are less “Earth’s mightiest” than “Earth’s most accessible”.
Second, Marvel knows this. If Thunderbolts* is about anything, it’s about how a group of third-rate superheroes, reformed assassins and sad sacks come together to save the day because nobody else was around. In terms of IP exploitation, this one’s up there with that Disney+ series about Hawkeye and the time Marvel thought it would be a good idea to hire Angelina Jolie as a warrior goddess with memory loss, then somehow forget to give her a storyline.
Of course, the studio has been here before. Nobody had heard of any of the Guardians of the Galaxy before James Gunn somehow delivered a trilogy of well-received films about a bunch of space idiots shouting at each other in slow motion over staples of 1970s AM radio. Marvel’s 1960s heyday was built on the then outlandish riff that superheroes might be just as flawed and existentially constipated as the rest of us. Their imperfections are what make characters such as Iron Man and Spider-Man worth investing in, while Thor is only ever even remotely interesting when he drops the whole invulnerable space god thing and reveals he’s really just a lightning-powered metaphor for fragile masculinity.
But Thunderbolts* feels different, because this new crew are not so much relatably flawed as completely broken. They’re not charmingly dysfunctional – they’re emotionally unavailable, morally compromised and in at least two cases (Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost) a bit bored to be here. There’s no sense that they want to be a team, nor that we should want them to be one. The joke in the Thunderbolts* end-credits scene is that Captain America (Sam Wilson) has already been in touch to complain that they’re infringing on his copyright. It’s as if Marvel has anticipated every brickbat – that Thunderbolts* is a cynical rebrand, that the team have no chemistry, that they’re just cosplay Avengers with unresolved trauma – and made sure to get in there first.
And yet perhaps this willingness to punch itself in the face before anyone else does is what has led the new film to emerge as one of the best-received episodes in the studio’s recent history. It’s hard to accuse Marvel of making a cynical cash grab when they seem to be actively undermining themselves for kicks at a time when the MCU has been lurching from flops to reshoots to box office faceplants. It’s as if the studio is challenging every critic of superhero films to watch this new one and witness a machine that has decided there is nothing left but to cheerfully eat itself while the world looks on.
Naturally, the smart money is on this cavalcade of misfits, also-rans and never-weres finding themselves sidelined when the real heroes roar back in Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars. And yet there’s a sneaking suspicion that Marvel wouldn’t have cast actors of the calibre of Pugh and Harbour if they were only intended to act as narrative duct tape to hold Phase Five together until Spidey and the X-Men sort out their scheduling conflicts. The question now is how Marvel creates a future that lives up to the euphoric buzz of the studio’s first decade, while honouring the strange, broken little corner of the universe it’s spent the last few years quietly assembling. Like it or not, the Thunderbolts* – sorry, New Avengers – are in the system now. And in the multiverse, nobody ever really gets written out.
