Thunderbolts Star Says It's Time For A "Good" Marvel Movie

Marvel's Thunderbolts have been billed as sort of the anti-Avengers. Commonly compared to DC Comics' Suicide Squad, it originally consisted of villains in disguise of new heroes, with some shedding their bad guy ways.

The roster has changed over the almost 30-year history with the team in the MCU consisting of Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko).

Russel was talking to a crowd at New York's 92NY community center about his AppleTV+ series, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters--also starring his iconic actor of a father, Kurt Russell--when the subject of the Thunderbolts came up and where they are in production. Quick answer: They haven't started filming nor has he seen a finished script.

"We have almost started shooting that about 14 times," Russell said (via THR). "I have confidence it's gonna be good. I know everybody is sort of on this Marvel train right now of things not going so well, [but] I know [director] Jake [Schreier] so well and I know how smart Jake is and how much he cares about making something interesting and different and utilizing everyone's talents to the best of their ability."

Russell added that he thinks the story they’ve come up with is really interesting, and couldn't get into specifics, but feels as if it's going to be very different from the standard Marvel fare.

"It's not a straightforward Marvel movie as you’ve seen in the past," he said. "I think that it's gonna be a lot of fun but I think it will be something that hopefully Marvel fans will look at and go, 'Oh OK, this is a little different, let's go hard at it.' And as far as how we are approaching it, it's time to go to work a little bit, it's time to make a good Marvel movie, so let's do that and work hard at it and don't take things for granted."

Marvel's Thunderbolts was announced at San Diego Comic-Con last year with the cast assembled for the first time with Schreier attached to direct and Eric Pearson and Lee Sung Jin writing the screenplay. Filming was originally supposed to begin in June 2023 but was put on hold due to the WGA strike over the summer. It was also originally scheduled to be the second-to-last film in Phase Five of the MCU with a release date of December 20, 2024. It was delayed again to July 25, 2025, and became part of Phase Six.