The first Thunderbolts* trailer that Marvel showed at D23 leaked online, giving us a look at the MCU’s Suicide Squad version. Unlike DC’s team, the Thunderbolts won’t be as suicidal. Also, this team of former antiheroes/villains will be much smaller, so there’s no need to kill anyone. I’m speculating, as I have no idea if any of the Thunderbolts team members will die by the end of the movie.
What I do know is that there’s an early Thunderbolts plot leak out there that confirms a few big plot details from the upcoming MCU crossover. It tells us who the surprise character and the big villain are. You probably know the answers if you’ve followed Thunderbolts leaks. Both those characters appeared in the leaked trailer earlier this week.
Interestingly, the Thunderbolts plot leak answers a lingering question we’ve had about the Avengers for years. Who bought Stark’s Avengers Tower?
You should avoid reading what follows below if you hate spoilers of any kind.
As with most MCU leaks, the Thunderbolts plot details come from Reddit. None of it can be confirmed at this time, but some details match what we saw in the first Thunderbolts trailer.
For example, the leak tells us that Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), US Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and Red Guardian (David Harbour) have all been trying to find new purpose in life. They supposedly feel aimless and drifting after their previous activities.
The first four are apparently working for Val (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), which is not a surprise. We saw her contact some of them in previous MCU adventures, and we know she’s up to no good.
The plot leak says the four get the same job but not as a team. Each of them is sent to the desert to a vault. They meet Bob (Lewis Pullman) in the vault, a man in a gown trapped there. After fighting each other, they realize it’s all a trap meant to kill everyone.
So far, the plot leak fits the events in the first Thunderbolts trailer with one small issue. Taskmaster wasn’t in that scene. Or the quality of the trailer was so bad that we couldn’t tell her apart from Ghost, who got a brand-new suit.
As for Bob, that’s the new big Marvel superhero (The Sentry) and villain (The Void). Both super-beings inhabit the same body, as Bob’s mind is deeply troubled.
Moving on, the Thunderbolts plot leak says that an organization called OXE will chase all of them and Bob to kill them. We see in the trailer a team of killers shooting their guns at Bob. But Bob can’t seem to care, as bullets can’t hurt him.
The plot leak says that Val is actually the leader of OXE and resides in the Avengers Tower, which she acquired from Stark. Moreover, Bob was one of Val’s projects. She wanted to make another super soldier. It turns out that Bob has a darker personality, the Void, which is a real problem.
Val is clearly the big villain here, though The Void will be the kind of incredibly dangerous threat the Thunderbolts will have some issues with. Maybe you stop shooting your guns at Bob?
We don’t get the full Thunderbolts plot in this leak, however. It’s unclear what the Thunderbolts have to do. The leak tells us that Yelena visits Red Guardian to ask for his help. As for Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), he’s a US congressman who will step in to help the Thunderbolts in the third act of the movie.
The team’s name will be Thunderbolts because that was the name of Yelena’s elementary school soccer team. The name might not matter, however. As a reminder, the title of Marvel’s movie has an asterisk: Thunderbolts*. One theory is that Marvel will call it Dark Avengers. Or that we’ll hear that team name towards the end of the movie.