“Thunderbolts”: Marvel’s Wild Card Mixes Antiheroes and Indie Talent From A24 & More

Recently, Florence Pugh, one of the stars of Marvel’s upcoming antihero epic Thunderbolts, said the Marvel Cinematic Universe installment was very unlike your average MCU addition. In fact, Pugh told Empire that Thunderbolts feels much more like an indie film.

“It ended up becoming this quite badass indie, A24-feeling assassin movie with Marvel superheroes,” Pugh told Empire. 

This isn’t just one of the film’s marquee names trying to give her movie an edge at the box office. In fact, given the creatives involved behind the camera, it sounds more like a plain statement of fact, even though the movie comes from one of the largest studio juggernauts in the world, Marvel, which itself is nested under the largest studio in Disney.

Let’s examine who’s behind Thunderbolts to flesh out Pugh’s statement. The director is Jack Schreier, the helmer of A24 produced, Netflix’s distributed gangbusters dark comedy Beef. He worked from a script co-written by Beef creator Lee Sung Jin, The Bear‘s Joanna Calo, and longtime Marvel scribe Eric Pearson. Then there’s the crop of talent from critically acclaimed A24 films, including cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo from The Green Knight, Minari editor Harry Yoon, and Everything Everywhere All At Once composer Son Lux.

Jake Schreier told Empire he was advdised to make “something different.” He added, “There’s a certain amount of that Beef tone in it, that does feel different. There’s an emotional darkness that we brought to this that is resonant, but doesn’t come at the expense of comedy.”

The Thunderbolts team is made up of Pugh’s Black Widow butt-kicker Yelena Belova, her dad, David Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian, and a slew of Marvel villains who have just enough moral flexibility to do good. Or, at least, be a little better than the even worse guys. Those include Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (although to be fair, he’s been a good guy for a while now), Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost (from the first Ant-Man), Olga Kurlyenko’s Taskmaster (from Black Widow), and Wyatt Russell’s John Walker (from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier). They’ve been assembled (pun intended) by Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, previously revealed as a kind of bad guy recruitment sage in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. 

Then, the film’s marketing is decidedly different from that of previous MCU films. In this minute-long teaser, the cast is introduced as stars from Midsommar (Pugh, despite having starred in previous Marvel films and shows), A Different Man (Sebastian Stan, despite having starred in previous Marvel films and shows), and You Hurt My Feelings (Louis-Dreyfus, again, who starred in a previous Marvel series), from the writers of Beef, the cinematographer of The Green Knight, and the production designer of Ari Aster’s horror masterpiece Hereditary (Grace Yun, also from Beef and Past Lives).  Tell this doesn’t look like an indie Marvel film:

Thunderbolts hits theaters on May 2, 2025, and has a chance of giving the cinematic universe an entirely different, offbeat feel. So far, it looks promising.

Featured image: (L-R): Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), and John Walker (Wyatt Russell) in Marvel Studios’ THUNDERBOLTS*. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2024 MARVEL.