Deadpool & Wolverine is the only MCU movie in theaters this year. Everything else was postponed to 2025 following last year’s monthslong strikes in the industry. That was all for the best since it gave Marvel more time to ensure the upcoming crop of movies is as good as possible.
As a reminder, we’re getting Captain America Brave New World, Thunderbolts, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps in theaters next year. Marvel already released the trailer for the first film, showing additional Captain America 4 footage at D23.
That’s also where the first Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts trailers dropped. They leaked online after that, as did additional footage from Brave New World. I’ve already told you what happens in each of those clips, and you might have seen bad-quality versions on social media.
Marvel will surely release those trailers and promo videos in the coming months as we get closer to the release dates of each MCU project. But we will also see some of the new characters elsewhere. Marvel is about to celebrate its 85th anniversary, after all. The company released a short clip for the occasion, which gives us a good, high-quality look at the Thunderbolts team and Red Hulk (Harrison Ford). Before we go any further, I’ll warn you that some spoilers will follow below.
Marvel released and then deleted the clip, but you can’t really delete stuff from the internet. Social media is filled with screenshots from the one-minute video, which gives us a brief look at some of the characters we’ll see in Marvel’s upcoming movies.
The Thunderbolts crossover is easily one of the most expected movies of the Multiverse Saga. It’ll be almost an Avengers-grade story, where multiple individuals with special abilities team up to take up some sort of evil.
Unlike the Avengers, the Thunderbolts are not exactly superheroes. Well, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) is an exception considering he’s already seen as an Avenger after the events in Endgame and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. We’re looking at antiheroes and villains in the Thunderbolts roster.
The leaked D23 trailer already showed us the big villains the Thunderbolts will have to face. The list includes Bob (Lewis Pullman), aka The Sentry. Well, it’ll be his evil alter ego, The Void, they’ll probably have to contain. Val (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is perhaps the bigger threat.
The 85th-anniversary clip that Marvel should rerelease soon features almost the entire team. In addition to Bucky, we have Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), and US Agent (Wyatt Russell) in an elevator. Missing from the image is Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). Maybe she’s behind Red Guardian?
I can confirm that the image comes from the leaked trailer we just saw. In that clip, the Thunderbolts team was about to visit Val. A Thunderbolts plot leak says that Val’s organization bought The Avengers Tower from Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), where she lives.
Later in the clip, Marvel gives us our best look at Red Hulk. We already saw him in the first Captain America 4 trailer. But this time, we get a better look at the new Hulk variant. The scene in the anniversary clip comes from the extended Brave New World clip Marvel played for the D23 audience. President Ross turns into the Red Hulk on the White House lawn as he’s attacked while giving a speech.
There’s no indication that Red Hulk and Thunderbolts will meet each other. The former will appear in Brave New World come February. Thunderbolts premieres a few months later, in May. Seeing the Red Hulk in Thunderbolts would be amazing, though, so I hope we see him in both upcoming new movies.
