The final act of the MCU‘s Phase Five just got a whole lot more real, with the first trailer for Thunderbolts* — the long-gestating, reportedly troubled, and release date-fickle union of the franchise’s finest antiheroes — having finally graced this planet of ours, and we daresay the studio might just be keeping its “quality over quantity” promise after all.
Indeed, the character dynamics and battlefield choreography all appear to be a cut above what we’ve come to expect from the studio, and the fact that the trailer alone boasts a well-defined thematic core is very promising indeed.
What we learned: Florence Pugh‘s Yelena is going to anchor the story, Bucky cleans his metal arm in a dishwasher, and Bucky also, quite mysteriously, appears to be an enemy of this titular assembly of Anti-Avengers.
What we didn’t learn in spite of an alleged plot leak that now looks more likely after this trailer: Why they’ve been assembled (which we hopefully won’t learn until the film releases), and how Lewis Pullman‘s Sentry fits into it all.
What we already knew but were happy to see anyway: Sentry himself, the character who’s bound to disrupt the canon’s power-scaling nuances on a scale we’ve not yet seen.
Indeed, in the comics, Sentry’s capabilities border on omnipotence, and are allegedly the result of an unthinkably-enhanced Super-Soldier Serum that adjusts the body’s molecules on a trans-dimensional level. Given the special ops set dressing of Thunderbolts*’ entire being, it will be no great surprise if this version of Sentry full-sends that origin story; his human lab experiment-esque getup only further points to such a thing, and the emblem below seems to foreshadow Sentry as a sort of project.
Moreover, considering that the overarching plotline of this saga is rooted in the existence of a multiverse, it could be the case that the Sentry serum becomes a key item in this saga the way that Shang-Chi’s rings and Kamala Khan’s bangles have. Such a serum would also tie directly into the nuances of Captain America: Brave New World, in which Super Soldier Isaiah Bradley will have a pretty significant role.
But Thunderbolts*‘ mileage isn’t going to come out of how it fits into the puzzle; it’s going to come out of how well it manages to stand on its own two feet as a story. And while it may be true that it’s the job of a trailer to make a movie look good, there’s the overwhelming sense that this trailer didn’t have to try as hard. Whatever the case may be, we’ll all know for ourselves when Thunderbolts* dives into cinemas on May 2, 2025.