Good news, Marvel lovers! Yelena Belova’s own Florence Pugh has offered our first look at filming on Thunderbolts*, with a set video offering the sneakiest tease at what we can expect from the 2025 anti-hero team-up film.
In doing so, Pugh has allowed Marvel Studios to announce the latest instance of its most infuriating — and, honestly, probably self-sabotaging — trend. In the Black Widow star’s set tour, a chair could be glimpsed with a new logo for the movie on it that read “Thunderbolts*.” Sure enough, when sharing Pugh’s video officially, the Marvel Studios X account likewise referred to director Jake Schreier’s production as “Thunderbolts*.” Yes, it’s all about the asterisk.
As you’d expect, the addition of the asterisk has sent Marvel fans into full-on detective mode as they theorize about what it could mean. Often an asterisk at the end of a word indicates a footnote, so it’s possible that Thunderbolts* will have a humorous subtitle of some kind, perhaps like DC’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn). Alternatively, some think the asterisk means the title is in flux and could be changed at a later date ⏤ maybe even to Dark Avengers, another villain team from the comics.
Either way, it looks like Thunderbolts* is all set to continue the Multiverse Saga’s habit of employing overly complicated titles. And I’m begging you, Kevin Feige, please make it stop.
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Marvel needs to go back to simple movie titles if it is to reclaim its box office domination
Remember when Marvel movies could just be called things like Iron Man 3 or Captain Marvel? In an apparent attempt to stave off superhero fatigue, Marvel has become increasingly creative with its film titles since the Multiverse Saga began. Just a few of the ungainly appellations we’ve been burdened with include Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
While Doctor Strange 2 and the similarly lengthy Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings admittedly performed perfectly well, the word soup that was Ant-Man 3 certainly didn’t. On the other end of the scale, The Marvels — a name too generic to really mean anything at all; they might as well have called it A Very Marvel Movie — similarly saw audiences turned away.
Meanwhile, more straightforward titles Spider-Man: No Way Home and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 are among the most acclaimed entries in this saga so far. Then we have the beautifully prosaic Deadpool & Wolverine, a movie that looks prepared to kill it in multiplexes come this July. There’s no real way to tell if Marvel’s titling decisions have had any effect on a film’s financial success, but it might be worth noting that — aside from Multiverse of Madness — those recent MCU movies with more conventional callsigns are the most popular.
So, what’s in a name? Maybe nothing, but I’m just saying, if Thunderbolts* does ape Birds of Prey — a movie that tanked and had to hastily be retitled Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey, FYI — and gets an OTT subtitle, it’s not exactly going to help its chances of avoiding the Multiverse Saga slump. That asterisk might just indicate Marvel is taking an astronomic risk.
Thunderbolts* releases on May 2, 2025.
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