At Thursday’s Walt Disney CinemaCon panel in Las Vegas, Nevada, Marvel boss Kevin Feige took to the stage to talk about the upcoming Marvel movies heading our way in the next two years. Along with teasing this summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine, he talked about the 2025 releases Captain America: Brave New World, The Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts. Notably, when Feige spoke about Thunderbolts, he made a revelation about the title. There’s a new title… Well, sort of.
The official title of Thunderbolts is now Thunderbolts*. That’s right, Marvel Studios decided to add an asterisk to the title. It even updated the title logo with a redesign that includes the symbol at the end (which you can see on X). When CinemaBlend attended the panel, here’s what Feige said on topic:
Yes, you’ll notice the asterisk on Thunderbolts. That is the official title of Thunderbolts, and we won’t talk more about that until after the movie comes out.
What in the Thunderbolts... err, Thunderbolts* is this supposed to mean? Per Kevin Feige’s comments, it sounds like the little asterisk that makes the slight title change has a significant meaning, and now I’ll be wracking my brain trying to figure out what that is. Given what he said, the reason for the asterisk goes into spoiler territory, and therefore he won’t be talking about it until after the movie is out in the world. Now I’m really confused about what’s in store for us with this release.
To get down a rabbit hole of speculation for a moment, let’s define why asterisks are used at the end of words first. The symbols are usually placed there when there’s a footnote at the bottom of a page that will offer additional information about said word. So to me, this title change just says that Kevin Feige and the good people at Marvel are trying to tell us that there’s more to this movie's story than meets the eyes. There’s a missing footnote, per se, we don’t know about the team being assembled here. Are they from another side of the multiverse? Skrulls? I really don’t know what to tell you.
For additional context, the Thunderbolts are a team of antiheroes, somewhat like DC’s Suicide Squad, who are brought together to by the American government to go on missions, perhaps a bit off books. With Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine assembling a myriad of characters from previous MCU films and TV shows, Marvel’s Thunderbolts* will bring this new team together.
We also know that the Thunderbolts* cast will bring together Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, Hannah Hohn-Kamen’s Ghost, Wyatt Russell’s U.S. Agent, Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster and Harrison Ford as Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, who is also the MCU’s president of the United States.
Thunderbolts* is currently being filmed in Atlanta, Georgia. (Florence Pugh even gave us a sneaky tour of the set last month). The movie will hit theaters on May 5, 2025.
