Marvel’s Misfits Have Mainstream Appeal: “Thunderbolts*” Strikes Box Office Gold
The box office weather report for Thunderbolts* was certainly looking good as Jake Shreier’s antihero epic entered its opening weekend. The reviews were very good for what Rolling Stone‘s David Fear called the “off-brand Avengers“—the Florence Pugh-led misfits and oddballs who were all tapped from previous MCU outings and thrown together into a fighting force. While Pugh is a certifable star, this collection of dysfunctional Marvel misfits are not as well known or belvoed as the Avengers, and Thunderbolts* might have felt like an MCU afterthought on way to this summer’s splashy, hotly anticiapted reboot The Fantastic Four: First Steps. That has turned out not to be the case. Thunderbolts* is a surprisingly soulful, character-driven return to form for a studio that had dominated the superhero space for years. Now, the box office numbers confirm that Marvel has a hit on its hands.
Thunderbolts* opened to a very solid $76 million domestically, with a whopping $86.1 million overseas, to strike a $162.1 million opening haul. Schreier’s movie, which Pugh called a “bad ass indie, A24-feeling assassin movie” was assembled by a crew of filmmakers with major indie cred, including several veterans from A24 films and series. Those include Schreier himself, who did lauded work on the A24-produced, Netflix-distributed gangbusters dark comedy Beef. Beef creator Lee Sung Jin helped shape the Thunderbolts* script, and then The Bear‘s Joanna Calo came in during production to fine-tune it (Marvel veteran Eric Pearson got the ball rolling with the first draft). The crew included Beef production designer Grace Yun, The Green Knight cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo, Minari editor Harry Yoon, and Everything Everywhere All At Once composer Son Lux.
The Thunderbolts* are led by Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, who, along with Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), John Walker/U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) are cornered in a death trap set by the triple agent Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Escaping Valentina’s dastardly effort has the odd side effect of forcing these loners to team up to confront their pasts and become a cohesive, or at least functionally collaborative, fighting force. Their pasts and their presents have all been shaped by their particular battles with depression, grief, and innumerable founts of pain. The film also includes Lewis Pullman’s Bob, a crucial figure in the movie (and the MCU’s future—he has a role in Avengers: Doomsday, as do many of the Thunderbolts*), whose mental illness is a major turning point in the film. It’s a rare Marvel film, or superhero movie in general, to center mental illness in the narrative.
Thunderbolts* opened on 4,330 domestic theaters, with a global IMAX haul of $20 million. Thunderbolts* enjoys a robust 95 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the third-highest score for a MCU film, tied with Spider-Man: Far From Home and behind Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (98 percent) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (97 percent). With an A-CinemaScore and 4.5 audience scores on PostTrak exit polls, Thunderbolts* is well-positioned to keep going strong. It also played to an ethnically diverse audience that was “only” 63 percent male, a lower percentage than most Marvel films.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Schreier explained that the Thunderbolts* creative team made a conscious effort to infuse some of that Beef magic into their film.
“With Beef as our North Star, we just really believed that there was an opportunity to tell a story about that internality and still have a lot of comedy and action for something that feels big and universal,” Schreier tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It was always Sonny’s [Beef creator Lee Sung Jin] idea that these kinds of stories are not niche anymore, and even if it feels odd to have a summer blockbuster with that at its heart, it can work and it can make sense.”
It worked, and it makes sense. Audiences helped prove that this weekend.
