Marvel reveals antihero team line-up for Thunderbolts movie

This past weekend, Disney premiered a ton of new trailers and information at its D23 Fan Expo. From new trailers for Marvel’s Secret Invasion series and Werewolf By Night Halloween special to sneak peeks at The Mandalorian season 3, Percy Jackson and the Olympians and Willow, the show was stacked. If Disney has its way, we’ll all be watching their programming until we wither away into dust.

Marvel had a few other exciting bits of information beyond trailers, of course. We learned that WandaVision director Matt Shakman will helm the highly-anticipated Fantastic Four reboot that’s slated to kickstart Marvel’s Phase 6, for example. And we also got a huge info drop about another big Marvel project: Thunderbolts.

Thunderbolts is basically Marvel’s equivalent of the Suicide Squad, a group of misfit antiheroes (or outright villains), who band together to mete out their own peculiar brand of justice. Marvel has been building toward this crossover event movie for a while by introducing Julia Louis-Dreyfuss’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who basically serves as the antihero team’s version of Nick Fury. She’s appeared throughout Phase 4 to seemingly recruit various characters, from Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) in Black Widow to John Walker/US Agent (Wyatt Russell) in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Marvel’s Thunderbolts line-up announced!

Now, we finally know the rest of the line-up. Marvel announced a bunch of the leads for the Thunderbolts movie, which is currently slated as the capstone to Phase 5. In addition to Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, Thunderbolts will feature David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost, Wyatt Russell’s US Agent, Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster, Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier.

We last saw Bucky and US Agent in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Yelena in Hawkeye, Red Guardian and Taskmaster in Black Widow, and Ghost in 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp. “These are my kinds of people,” said Sebastian Stan at D23, per IGN. “They look like a good troubled bunch and maybe I know a thing or two about that.”

“Says a lot about the Thunderbolts when the beloved Winter Soldier is the most stable among them,” joked MCU boss Kevin Feige.

There are a few notable absences from the Thunderbolts cast, which is leading many fans to think more announcements may come before the movie hits in 2024. Both Baron Zemo (Daniel Brühl) and Abomination (Tim Roth) are members of this super-team in the comics, and have also featured prominently in the MCU of late. So while we haven’t heard about their inclusion yet, don’t count them out.

Thunderbolts is currently scheduled to release on July 24, 2024.

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