New Thunderbolts trailer shows Marvel villains facing new threat without the Avengers

Yahoo

10-02-2025

The Thunderbolts are ready to get into action but only because they are the only ones able to deal with a new, terrifying threat, the film's new Super Bowl trailer has revealed.
Marvel has so far been pitching the movie as being about the worst villains in the MCU being brought together as a team but their purpose wasn't revealed until now. The Super Bowl trailer teased that the rag-tag group are tasked with dealing with a dark new threat, and they're the only ones who can possibly step in to do so.
Cue Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) bringing together Yelena (Florence Pugh), Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) to get the job done. The trailer revealed a lot more of what we can expect from their mission, here is what we can take away from it.
The Super Bowl trailer for The Thunderbolts opens on a dark note, with an all-powerful enemy seemingly attacking people at random in New York City. In blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments it can be seen that the Big Apple is being covered in shadows with buildings being destroyed and people disappearing into shadow — a void if you will.
Watch: The Super Bowl trailer for Thunderbolts*
This is the first glimpse viewers have gotten of The Void, a new all-powerful enemy that has connections to another newbie to the franchise Sentry, aka Bob. Darkness descends on New York City in a big way because of The Void, but fans won't see the usual heroes step up to stop him.
The Avengers are not coming, that's what Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Valentina Allegra de Fontaine tells a courtroom a the start of the trailer. She appears to be making a plea to create a new type of team to face the new threat, with Bucky leading the charge.
Why are the Avengers gone? Well, this may well depends on where the film sits in the Marvel timeline but if it comes directly after the events of Captain America: Brave New World then there could well be a reason Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) et al aren't able to come to their aid. Perhaps the Avengers are too busy dealing with another threat, maybe of the multi-versal kind, which means they're out of the picture when the Void comes knocking.
This brings us to the team that are brought together in order to face The Void — the Thunderbolts*, whose team name has an asterisk seemingly because it is only Red Guardian who likes it. What could their official title be? Well, it's likely that they'll be called the Dark Avengers.
The Dark Avengers are a group not unlike the Suicide Squad of villains who are brought together to take part in secret, dangerous missions where anything goes. Pugh's Yelena comments on this in the Super Bowl trailer, asking if they all "just punch and shoot" to get through the mission.
The implication that the group will do whatever it takes to move away from the mistakes of the past will certainly give them a chance to be seen as something other than the villains they've been painted out to be.
Thunderbolts* premieres in cinemas on 2 May, 2025.