ThunderboltsMarvel's
Published on December 13, 2025 EDT

Someone is trying to kill Marvel's antiheroes. Can they work with each other instead of beating the heck out of each other to survive?

Thunderbolts* (a curious asterisk included in that official title) gets an extended trailer debut Monday that runs a bit longer than your average movie preview. The footage digs into how the likes of Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova, Sebastian Stan's Winter Soldier/Bucky Barnes, Wyatt Russell's John Walker, Hannah John-Kamen's Ava Starr/Ghost, David Harbour's Red Guardian/Alexei Shostakov, and Olga Kurylenko's Taskmaster all come to find each other.

Apparently, someone wants them out of the picture. Yelena (still reeling from the loss of her sister, Scarlett Johansson's Natasha Romanoff) theorizes they are all too much of a liability, having each been involved in some kind of shady operation in the past. "Everyone here has done bad things: shadow ops, robbing government labs, contract kills," she says. "So someone wants us gone."

Courtesy of Marvel Studios

With everyone down on their luck, most of the crew are lured to a secret facility, where each assumes the others are trying to kill them. So their first introduction as a group is fighting themselves...

Until they realize they aren't alone. A man named Bob (Lewis Pullman's mystery role who has long been rumored to be the comic-book character Sentry) is also in the room. (At the very least, we know he's bulletproof.) Then the vibe immediately changes.

"We're brought up with this belief that there are good guys and there are bad guys," says Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Val for short), who's like a dark twist on Nick Fury. "But eventually you come to realize that there are bad guys and there are worse guys and no one else."

Courtesy of Marvel Studios

The Thunderbolts* trailer features some less foreboding moments, as well, such as Stan's Bucky taking his vibranium arm out of the dishwasher, Yelena and Alexei having an uncomfortable father-daughter reunion after the events of Black Widow, and general hijinks that ensue when you get someone like John Walker in the same vehicle as the Red Guardian while they're being chased by the Winter Soldier.

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"David and I, in the first movie, as much as we possibly could, squeezed as much as we could out of the time that we had together," Pugh previously told Entertainment Weekly at Comic-Con of the Yelena-Aleksei relationship. "Knowing that we were both coming back to do any version of a second movie, there was no way that we couldn’t jump into it further and go where these people are in the state of their lives right now."

Thunderbolts*, directed by Jake Schreier, opens in theaters May 2, 2025. Watch the trailer above.

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