Thunderbolts is a 2025 American superhero film based on Marvel Comics featuring the team Thunderbolts.

Produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, it is the 36th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The film was directed by Jake Schreier from a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo. The movie had premiered on April 22 at the Cineworld Leicester Square in London, England, and was released in the United States on May 2, as the final film of Phase Five of the MCU.

The film’s ending reveals that the Thunderbolts team is rebranded as ‘The New Avengers’ following the film’s opening weekend, Marvel Studios implemented a rebranding of the film itself as The New Avengers in alignment with the narrative development.

The plot follows Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) one of the Black Widows and sister to Natasha Romanoff. Burnt out in her job as a ‘cleaner’ for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) she seeks a more formidable role, inspired partly by her father, Alexei Shostakov aka Red Guardian (David Harbour) who dreams of bigger things.

When she poses this idea to de Fontaine, her shadowy boss agrees, so long as she’ll complete one final mission. De Fontaine has other ideas. She’s busy cleaning house while under a congressional investigation and wants all evidence of her misdeeds scrubbed, including her special operatives, who she pits against one another in a remote lab deep underground.

Things don’t go her way, and our rag-tag band of heroes escapes with a mysterious man named Bob (Lewis Pullan) with equally mysterious powers and an adorably affable demeanor. One thing leads to another, and the reluctant band of anti-heroes ends up teaming up to take down de Fontaine.

In Malaysia, Yelena Belova destroys a laboratory on behalf of CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine to conceal her involvement with the OXE Group’s ‘Sentry’ superhuman project. As de Fontaine faces imminent impeachment for her work with the group, she dispatches Yelena, John Walker, Ava Starr, and Taskmaster to a covert OXE facility under the pretense of a mission. Once there, the operatives are pitted against one another in a deadly confrontation where Ava kills Taskmaster before they unexpectedly discover a mysterious man named Bob.

Where the film stumbles, rather badly, is in its third act. When things take a terrible turn for the worse, our heroes have to face off against Sentry, a superhero more powerful than all the original Avengers combined (according to de Fontaine). Get into the world of superheroes, if such action keeps your adrenalin flowing.

Rating – ***
Genre: Superhero action
Starring: Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman