Has it felt like something has been missing since Phase 4 started with WandaVision? In case you haven’t noticed, you could count on one hand the number of times the Avengers have been talked about, and it’s not just because they’ve failed to meet up for shawarma lately. According to Kevin Feige during the D23 Expo last weekend (via CBM), the Avengers no longer exist…
Kevin Feige said, “You know, one thing in the Captain America film is that there currently is a world without the Avengers. Sam Wilson finds himself as Cap at a time where there’s not an organization of Avengers.”
The timing of this couldn’t be more convenient. In the comics, it was the absence of the Avengers during the Heroes Reborn storyline that led to the formation of the Thunderbolts, villains who posed as heroes and fooled the public. Turns out, the team going bye-bye in the MCU has led to the exact same thing…
“But just because there’s not an organization of the Avengers doesn’t mean there’s not a group of superheroes in the MCU,” Feige continued. “Not a group, perhaps, as The Avengers but there’s a group and they’re called the Thunderbolts.”
That group we learned over the weekend would be led by Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, and joined by Sebastian Stan as Buck, Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost, David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. This version of the team consists mainly of former villains who have turned over a new leaf, but it seems they’ll get pulled into the grey area by Valentina.
What will be interesting to see is what happens to the Thunderbolts when the Avengers eventually return. Will Avengers: The Kang Dynasty lead to a showdown between the two teams?
