The Avengers will supposedly reassemble next year in Captain America: Brave New World under the leadership of Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie). It’s not exactly a spoiler. It’s what the rumors say and what Marvel suggested. The new Brave New World trailers will also share this big plot point. But we won’t really see the Avengers again in earnest until Doomsday and Secret Wars.
That makes Thunderbolts* the biggest MCU crossover in years. We’ll have a team of multiple protagonists, exceeding the likes of Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Marvels, and Deadpool & Wolverine. It might be a team of former antiheroes and villains from the MCU, but it still counts.
This brings me to the unusual title of the movie. Marvel styled it from a simple Thunderbolts to Thunderbolts*. Yes, that’s Thunderbolts-asterisk, and that asterisk is one of the film’s biggest mysteries.
Why did Marvel add the symbol to the title? Is it supposed to be called something else? Or is it supposed just to annoy us? On the latter point, I’ll refer to the film as Thunderbolts henceforward.
Luckily, there’s been a flurry of Thunderbolts leaks in recent weeks. We saw the D23 Thunderbolts trailer, which Marvel will surely release publicly in the coming months. We also have the first Thunderbolts plot details out in the wild, and they match some of the action in the trailer.
All of that prompted new speculation about that asterisk in the title, and I’m about to tell you all about it. I have to warn you that if the Thunderbolts title speculation is accurate, big spoilers will follow below.
Thunderbolt Ross (Harrison Ford) is about to become Red Hulk in Brave New World. Before all that, Ross tells Sam that he’d like the new Captain America to form a new Avengers team. Thunderbolts (May 2025) premiers after Brave New World (February 2025) in the real world.
But it’s too early to say how these adventures fall in the Multiverse Saga chronology. Could the Thunderbolts be Ross’s alternate team of superheroes? You know, the kind of government-controlled Avengers-type characters who would not question orders? Also, if that’s true, the asterisk in the Thunderbolts title doesn’t have an immediate explanation.
I will say that the leaked Thunderbolts trailer seems to suggest a different story. Nobody assembled the Thunderbolts team. That’s going to be Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), US Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and Red Guardian (David Harbour).
Rather, they assemble themselves, at least initially. They do it as the Thunderbolts realize they’re being hunted for the possibly questionable jobs they performed for the US government. It’s likely that Val (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) hired all of them and wants them dead.
The Thunderbolts plot leak we saw recently also gives us the origin of the name. Yelena’s soccer team was supposedly called the Thunderbolts when she was little.
Back to the leaked trailer, the footage suggests we’re getting a redemption story. Most of these characters are in a bad place after what they did in their respective shady careers so far. They can certainly benefit from a reboot. Red Guardian is especially excited about the new team in the trailer.
What does it all mean for the Thunderbolts title? What does that asterisk stand for? Well, Marvel added it to the title only in March 2024, teasing that the asterisk would be explained after the film hit theaters. But theories already exist about what it all means.
The most exciting one says the Thunderbolts team will actually become the Dark Avengers in the MCU. We’d have a few characters ready to perform morally questionable activities. Some have redeemed themselves. Bucky is recognized as an Avenger in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Others not so much, but they might want to experience such redemption.
One unlikely possibility would be for Marvel to simply change the name of Thunderbolts to Dark Avengers at the last possible minute. It might hurt the Thunderbolts marketing, but then you’d have a movie in theaters next year with “Avengers” in the title.
The more plausible scenario is for someone to assemble the Dark Avengers by the end of Thunderbolts or in the credits scenes. I’m simply speculating here. But that’s how the Thunderbolts could become the Dark Avengers. The asterisk could mean Marvel will never use the Thunderbolts team name again.
I haven’t read the comics, and I don’t plan to do it before the movie hits theaters. After all, Marvel doesn’t tell the same stories as the comics. But I have to say the perspective of having the Thunderbolts become the Dark Avengers is exciting. Not to mention that some team members might overlap.
Then again, this is just a theory. I’m sure that Thunderbolts will be equally successful regardless of what the asterisk in the title actually signifies.
