There’s more troubling news for Marvel as it sounds like their anti-hero ensemble Thunderbolts appears to have been taken off Disney‘s theatrical slate for 2025 after Disney chief Bob Iger revealed the films the House of Mouse is sending to theaters next year. Iger was speaking at an earnings call, and announced that a number of films would be released in those 12 months — Captain America: Brave New World, Fantastic Four, Elio, Zootopia 2, and Avatar 3 — with no room for Thunderbolts, which had been slated originally for a summer 2025 release.
The news probably shouldn’t come as a surprise — the film is due to begin shooting in the spring of this year, but a spate of casting changes have already occurred due to the countless delays in production, partly due to last year’s lengthy SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. The film lost both Ayo Edebiri — replaced in her role by Geraldine Viswanathan — as well as Steven Yeun in the role of Sentry, with a replacement yet to be announced, although Lewis Pullman has been heavily linked with the casting in the time since.
The film will also feature Wyatt Russell as John Walker, Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes alongside the trio of Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, David Harbour as Alexei Shostakov aka Red Guardian, and Olga Kurylenko as Antonia Dreykov aka the Taskmaster reprising their roles from the Black Widow film. The cast further includes Hannah John-Kamen as Ava Starr/Ghost and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. Harrison Ford will make an appearance as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, who’ll join the MCU in Captain America: Brave New World.
What Will ‘Thunderbolts’ Be About?
The movie follows a group of “anti-heroes” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe who are brought together by Louis-Dreyfus’ Val, a twisted version of Nick Fury, who will force the characters to work together to avert a threat. Director Jake Schreier admitted he was thrilled to take on the story and do something new within the MCU.
“It was just a really different approach and a new kind of story to tell amidst that, which I know they’ve made so many things, but it’s not a sequel. Yes, these characters have appeared before, but it is a new story being told and a story, I think, with a very different perspective than maybe people aren’t expecting, and I think that that felt exciting and felt like a real challenge worth taking on.”
Thunderbolts was set for a July 2025 release date — stay tuned to Collider to find out if that date remains.
via Collider