Thunderbolts* Super Bowl Trailer Tries To Hide The Blockbuster's Villain, But I Think We Know Who It Is

To date, the previews for the upcoming Marvel movie Thunderbolts* have mostly been focused on the ensemble. The characters that have been collected as the roster for the titular team are all off-beat antagonist-types, and the marketing has principally focused on their fun dynamic as a unit (described recently by Sebastian Stan as a Brat Pack-esque feature). Today, the film debuted a brand new trailer for the Marvel Studios blockbuster that finally gives us a better sense of the story – and while there is a clear attempt to try and hide the identity of the movie's main villain, I'm pretty confident I know who it is.

In this new Thunderbolts* trailer, it's revealed that the team has been brought together because there is serious threat to the world that has emerged and there is a consensus that the Avengers are not going to assemble to stop it. We see evidence of this threat's power via people being vaporized and helicopters crashing, but whenever the big bad is featured on screen, they are only represented as a silhouette:

Marvel Studios has a history of using visual effects to manipulate scenes in marketing materials, and I think it's safe to say that they are being employed here to prevent us from recognizing who the villain is:

It's a valiant effort, but I think it's pretty clear who it is: Bob Reynolds a.k.a. Sentry (played by Lewis Pullman).

Those who have been paying attention to Thunderbolts* will recall that Bob was prominently featured as a character in the first trailer for the blockbuster that arrived in September, but that footage just had him featured as an ordinary guy with no awareness of why he was suddenly meeting a group of costumed heroes. We haven't seen too much of him in the materials that have released since then, and his absence may be explainable if he is the big bad that Marvel Studios is trying to keep in the shadows pre-release.

While Sentry is typically a force for good in Marvel Comics, a significant part of his history on the page has him doing battle with a force known as the Void – a dark half that exists within him and that he is constantly trying to keep at bay. When the character was first introduced, it was established that he went as far as to erase himself from the minds of everyone to stop the Void from destroying the world.

Directed by Jake Schreier, Thunderbolts* will be arriving as the second Marvel Cinematic Universe film of 2025 following Captain America: Brave New World (which debuts in theaters everywhere this Friday). The movie features what is easily one of the best ensembles that Marvel Studios has put together to date – including Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Hannah John-Kamen, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus – and the film will be in theaters everywhere on May 2.