Did Marvel Just Accidentally Spoil Thunderbolts?
Who lives, who dies, who squares off against an Avenger?
March 26, 2025 is a day that will live in infamy: the day millions of Marvel fans across the globe spent hours watching chairs. In a tedious, hours-long livestream that is still running at the time of writing, dozens of stars were announced for the next flagship Avengers movie, Avengers: Doomsday, from the obvious (the Fantastic Four) to the surprising (Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen.)
But some of the most shocking names may have done more than just stoke fan anticipation — they may also reveal the next MCU movie is way more important than we first thought.
The vast cast list for Avengers: Doomsday includes almost all of the Thunderbolts.
This cast announcement comes a little more than a month before the release of Thunderbolts, the anti-hero super squad movie that has been in the works since 2021’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The movie follows an unlikely group of heroes including Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Red Guardian (David Harbour), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurlyenko), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), and new guy Sentry (Lewis Pullman.)
The Thunderbolts are essentially Marvel’s Suicide Squad, the B-team of heroes you send in when the Avengers are unavailable. Considering how most of these characters are cast-offs from long-forgotten movies (remember Ant-Man and the Wasp?), many fans didn’t think this movie would have lasting consequences. Instead, it would be a classic MCU team-up movie, a fun romp before The Fantastic Four: First Steps led the way for Avengers: Doomsday.
The unlikely team will reprise their roles alongside — and perhaps even part of — the Avengers.
But one by one, basically every member of the Thunderbolts was revealed to feature in the movie, beginning with Florence Pugh and ending with Hannah John-Kamen. However, there were some exceptions. Olga Kurylenko, who played Taskmaster in Black Widow, was not mentioned at all, lending credence to the theories she’ll meet her demise early in the movie, considering she only appears rarely in the movie trailer.
Also missing from the cast list is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who plays Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, the mastermind of the Thunderbolts team. It makes sense that the Avengers would probably want to keep her at arms’ length — she’s the new owner of Avengers Tower, after all. But her omission from this list means she won’t even appear, so she may not make it until the end credits of Thunderbolts either.
There’s still more than a month to wait for Thunderbolts, but these announcements prove that not only will most of these characters survive to fight on another day, they may just play a bigger role in the MCU than we ever thought possible.
