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Movie Name: Thunderbolts*
Directed by: Jake Schreier
Starring: David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Geraldine Viswanathan, Lewis Pullman, Olga Kurylenko, Florence Pugh
Genre: Superhero, Action, Adventure, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi
Running Time: 126 Minutes
Release Date: May 02, 2025
Rating:
Languages: English
Production House: Marvel Studios
Budget: $ – million
A group of antiheroes are caught in a deadly trap by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine and are forced into a dangerous mission that could bring them redemption if they unite as a team.
Thunderbolts*: Movie Overview
Thunderbolts* is an upcoming American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics team Thunderbolts. Produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, it is intended to be the 36th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The film is directed by Jake Schreier from a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, and stars an ensemble cast featuring Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Geraldine Viswanathan, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. In the film, a group of antiheroes are caught in a deadly trap and forced to work together on a dangerous mission.
Marvel Studios began teasing the formation of a Thunderbolts team within the MCU in 2021. The film was revealed to be in development in June 2022, when Schreier and Pearson were attached. The main cast was revealed in September, with additional casting through early 2023. Lee Sung Jin joined to rewrite the script by March 2023, one of several creatives who returned to work with Schreier from the Netflix series Beef (2023–present). Production was delayed due to the 2023 Hollywood labor disputes, causing some cast changes in early 2024. Calo joined by then for further rewrites. Filming took place from February to June 2024 at Trilith Studios and Atlanta Metro Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, and also on location in Utah and Kuala Lumpur.
Thunderbolts* is scheduled to be released in the United States on May 2, 2025, as the final film of Phase Five of the MCU.
The band Son Lux began recording the score for Thunderbolts* at Abbey Road Studios in London in the first week of February 2025, after previously scoring Schreier’s film Paper Towns (2015).
Thunderbolts* is scheduled to be released in the United States on May 2, 2025, in IMAX, ScreenX, and 4DX. It was previously scheduled for July 26, 2024, December 20, 2024, and July 25, 2025. It will be the final film of Phase Five of the MCU.
Movie Trailer:
Thunderbolts*: Movie Review
Florence Pugh shines amid the ennui of Marvel’s mid-life crisis
Wavering under the weight of expectations, ‘Thunderbolts*’ offers the MCU a welcome detour with its melancholic ensemble piece about has-beens learning to matter again
With Thunderbolts* (the asterisk denotes a little something that’s worth ceasing all phones at early screenings), Marvel Studios offers a strange something. Not a new beginning, not even an end, but a reluctant middle piece to its dwindling self-worth nearing the conclusion of Phase-5. After a decade-plus of spandex operatics, cosmic showdowns, and multiversal migraines, we’ve arrived at the era of mid-tier misfits and discards. The Avengers are either dead, de-aged, or trapped in development hell. The remaining bench is a set of weary characters staring down the abyss of their own irrelevance.
A former child assassin, a disgraced Captain America knockoff, a super-assassin turned congressman, a haunted quantum blur, a Soviet relic, and a human emotional contagion named Bob. They’ve been shelved, sidelined, and mostly forgotten — by their government handlers, by the world they supposedly saved, and, most damningly, by their jaded audiences who’ve long since moved on. What throws Thunderbolts* a lifeline in the slow, defibrillator rhythm of a post-Endgame Marvel is that Kevin Feige has finally started to admit that the party might just be over.
Once a promising successor to her late sister Natasha Romanoff’s Black Widow, Florence Pugh returns as Yelena Belova, still mourning her sister, still drolly Russian, and still the Phase-5’s most emotionally legible performer. She wears her disillusionment like a second skin and her job is no longer to avenge, but to merely trudge along begrudgingly, and that’s proving more difficult by the day. “Maybe I’m just bored,” she says early on, which feels like a discerning summation of the post-Endgame age.Thunderbolts* doesn’t solve that problem. But it does acknowledge it with unusual clarity, and that alone makes it one of Marvel’s more human efforts in years.
Director Jake Schreier (of Robot & Frank and the 2015 adaptation of John Green’s Paper Towns) brings a light indie touch to the proceedings. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in the convoluted lore or flashy pyrotechnica of modern superhero fare, and instead, lets his cast rattle around in desaturated corridors and puts them in vulnerable spots. No one could reinvent the MCU at this point, but he does subtly redirect it.
The plot, as is often the case, is the weakest link. CIA head honcho Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, whose dry wit is underserved by the script) tricks our assorted antiheroes into a mission that’s really a death trap. One by one, they realise they’ve been sent to eliminate each other, and we soon get a slow-burn mutiny of sad-eyed soldiers who would rather hug it out than throw punches, at least most of the time.
David Harbour’s Red Guardian continues his grumpy dad routine with winning goofiness. He gets some of the film’s funniest lines (Yelena’s pee-wee soccer team becomes an ongoing source of oddly affecting pride), but his real role is to tether the film’s sky-high gloom to something earthbound and foolishly tender. Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes also reappears, with a more grounded gravitas that reminds you he once had a more engaging storyline. Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, still festering from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, scowls his way through a majority of the film, and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost remains half-formed, but that feels appropriate — her power is literally to phase in and out. And Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster… well.
These are characters stuck in a kind of cinematic purgatory. They’re not quite important enough for franchise salvation, but not disposable enough to be killed off. They’re the narrative flotsam of past installments, with enough courage to question what actually happens to a superhero deferred. The action is competent but rarely thrilling and the colour palette leans hard on shadows and grime. But amid the industrial drabness, a freshness takes form and the characters begin to breathe.
The new wildcard is Lewis Pullman’s Bob, a fragile, mumbling superbeing with the power to make people feel the worst thing about themselves. That his supposedly omnipotent abilities are practically weaponised depression is quite telling. When he loses control, he becomes a living fog of despair, swallowing blocks of Manhattan in shapeless, shadowy grief. It’s a heavy metaphor, but Pullman sells it with a twitchy, wounded sincerity. Bob is the first Marvel character in ages who seems genuinely surprised (and a little terrified) to be in a Marvel movie.
It’s actually through Bob that Thunderbolts* achieves its most ambitious emotional swing. This rag-tag group of “disposable delinquents” isn’t trying to stop a bad guy so much as stop being the bad guys, and their arcs aren’t driven by fate or destiny, but by therapy-adjacent self-reflection. In the end, it all leads back to Yelena, whose sardonic emotional register makes her a compelling nucleus. Pugh’s performance builds momentum in silence and she’s the only one in the ensemble who seems to understand that the real villain is disconnection.
It’s messy, meandering, and emotionally lopsided, but Thunderbolts* feels like it was made by people who wanted to be there. That’s more than can be said for most Marvel projects in recent memory. That Thunderbolts* feels like a minor miracle in the post-Endgame MCU is less a credit to the film itself than a damning verdict on the films that came before it. It’s a modest movie, practically allergic to MCU chutzpah, and yet it succeeds where so many others have failed.
