Marvel Just Wasted Its Greatest Twist In Years
The New Avengers are coming together just as the universe is falling apart.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Thunderbolts*.
It’s no secret that Marvel has been caught in a creative spiral. Since breaking the MCU down to its raw foundations in Avengers: Endgame, the franchise has struggled to build itself back up. It’s thrown everything at the wall, from a new Thanos-type figure in Kang the Conqueror, to the threat of multiversal incursions. Until Robert Downey Jr. announced his return as Doctor Doom, and Marvel set a release date for its Fantastic Four reboot, nothing managed to stick. Now the franchise has a new endgame to build towards, but with only two years to do it, it’s trampling over everything in its path to get to the next Avengers movie.
At this stage, all roads now lead to Avengers: Doomsday, and even the projects that should be self-contained have been positioned as major stepping stones on the road to the finish line. That’s especially true for Thunderbolts*, a film that, on paper, seemed like a grounded palate cleanser ahead of Fantastic Four: First Steps. But the film and its eponymous team have surprised audiences in more ways than one. Thunderbolts* is much more important than its initial premise would have anyone believe. It also features the most clever twist Marvel’s thought up in years, but we don’t get much time to enjoy it before we’re pulled in a new direction.
The Thunderbolts are now the New Avengers — but their reign doesn’t last long.
Just before the credits roll, the Thunderbolts team — comprised of former Black Widow Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), the Red Guardian (David Harbour), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), US Agent John Walker, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Bob/Sentry/The Void (Lewis Pullman) — are named the New Avengers. It’s been half a decade since any heroes have teamed up under that moniker, so it’s about damn time we get the next iteration of the super-team. It also helps that this group feels more like a family than any Avengers line-up we’ve ever had, establishing a stronger, emotional foundation for the films to come.
The only problem with their appointment comes from the looming dread of Doomsday. The New Avengers are coming together just as the universe is falling apart, and that turns this promising team into a tool to accelerate an underbaked narrative.
We feel this the most after Thunderbolts technically ends. In a stylish credits sequence, dubious magazine and newspaper headlines question the team’s efficacy. The final post-credits scene then jumps 14 months into the future, reintroducing our heroes at their new base, the Watchtower. Yelena reveals that the new Captain America, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), is suing the New Avengers for their namesake. Bucky hints at his attempts to smooth things over with his old friend, noting only that their conversations “went poorly.” Then, suddenly, an extradimensional spacecraft appears above the Watchtower. It’s the Fantastic Four — a group we’ve yet to actually meet — forcing the Thunderbolts to table their troubles for a later date.
Whatever you want to call them, the New Avengers deserve better than a rushed credits scene.
At first blush, this credits scene is the most exciting, concrete tease for Doomsday we’ve gotten so far. Paired with Marvel’s new marketing strategy for Thunderbolts, which has been hastily renamed to The New Avengers, it’s impossible to focus on anything but the immediate future. But that also does a disservice to the perfectly good story we just experienced, and the new path it offers. Not only does this post-credit scene take the mystery out of Marvel’s next phase, spoiling Fantastic Four completely, but it also speedruns through a twist that could have fueled a great new arc for the MCU.
There’s another compelling Thunderbolts story living in the footnotes of this film, trapped between its credits and post-credits sequences — but there’s no time to explore it. This time jump undermines all the emotional stakes that Thunderbolts built between its characters, skipping over prime opportunities to explore these dynamics further.
Whatever you want to call them, this team deserves the chance to breathe — to explore the MCU, and their place in it, on their terms. Marvel’s in such a rush to set up Fantastic Four and Doomsday that it’s ignoring the fantastic story it already has. It’s the same issue Marvel ran into with past Avengers films, prioritizing a world-ending threat over the bonds between the heroes saving the day. The franchise’s new strategy is actually the same as the old: the MCU may have finally found its footing again, but it hasn’t learned anything from its past mistakes.
