Marvel Just Accidentally Answered A Thunderbolts Mystery
Meet the second-best supersquad in the universe.
Now that Captain America: Brave New World is hitting theaters, Marvel fans are looking ahead to the next MCU movie on the roster, Thunderbolts. However, it’s not really called Thunderbolts. The proper title is Thunderbolts*, complete with an inexplicable asterisk that seemed to be there for no particular reason.
Marvel hasn’t commented on it, but that hasn’t stopped fans from guessing about its purpose. Maybe it’s to distance the team from President Thaddeus Ross, maybe it’s to poke fun at the fact the team looks nothing like its comics counterpart, or maybe, as the trailer suggests, it’s just to note that not everyone on the team approves of the name.
We may finally have our answer thanks to an international poster for the film, and while it’s one of the less interesting solutions to the riddle, it does tie everything into the Avengers.
The Twitter account for Marvel Studios Japan recently shared a new Thunderbolts* poster in the wake of the latest trailer, and instead of just showing the asterisk, it also included a disclaimer in fine print at the bottom reading “*THE AVENGERS ARE NOT AVAILABLE.”
Marvel Japan finally explained that pesky asterisk.
This confirms a theory some fans floated after the trailer showed Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine saying, “The Avengers are not coming. Who will keep the American people safe?” The Thunderbolts aren’t Suicide Squad-esque anti-Avengers so much as the understudies who’ve been forced to go on for the big guys.
This implies the Avengers will be a point of comparison for the Thunderbolts, and that we may learn just what’s keeping the regular Avengers from forming. Sure, Peter Parker has been wiped from human memory and Doctor Strange is presumedly off in another dimension, but Captain America is clearly hanging around, and The Marvels are waiting in the wings. So why are we turning to the B-team?
Behold, the most powerful superhero group on Earth, except for that other one.
The poster states these characters are “Not super,” which is not true in the literal sense at all — John Walker took the super-soldier serum, Ghost can become invisible, and Yelena was trained in the Red Room. It also says they aren’t heroes, which is a much easier claim to accept: in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, we saw John Walker brutally cave a guy’s skull in with his shield, while Yelena and Alexei have been hesitant to do much saving after the events of Black Widow.
But regardless of their identity and morality, they’re the defense the world has in the absence of the Avengers. They may be the B-Team, but that’s always preferable to no team at all.
