Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier on why he wanted to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Australia Broadcast Center

03-05-2025

For Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier, he knew he wanted in on the project upon hearing that Florence Pugh (Midsommar, Oppenheimer) would be involved.
"I'm such a big Florence Pugh fan," Schreier tells ABC Entertainment. "Ever since Lady Macbeth, I just felt like [you have to take] any opportunity you have to work with her, in any context."
The 36th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Thunderbolts* sees Pugh, as Black Widow assassin Yelena Belova, leading a group of criminals and super-powered misfits who are forced to band together against a common enemy who wants them dead.
New York's streets take yet another punding in Thunderbolts*. (Pictured, l-r) Sebastian Stan, Hannah John-Kamen, Florence Pugh, Wyatt Russell and David Harbour.
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Also reprising their roles from previous MCU properties are Sebastian Stan as Bucky, Wyatt Russell as John Walker, Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost and David Harbour as Red Guardian.
And yes, that is indeed an asterisk at the end of Thunderbolts, but no, don't bother looking for a footnote at the end of this article explaining why. There has been a lot of online speculation about the asterisk, but you'll just have to wait until the end of the movie to find out what it means.
I've previously been on record as a comic book nerd who now suffers from comic book movie fatigue. Bigger set pieces, louder explosions, more cameos and even more wink-wink Easter eggs can only take you so far before the eventual diminishing returns.
How much more destruction can New York City take at this point? (If you've seen the trailers, you already know that The Big Apple has once again not been spared.)
"Working on a Marvel movie is always so bonkers, like, 'We're gonna do that?'" Pugh told The Hollywood Reporter.
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But the good news is — other than succumbing to some overly familiar MCU beats at the end of the film — Thunderbolts*, for the most part, is a decidedly different and genuinely fresh entry in this ever-expanding cinematic universe.
The film is a well-written, well-acted, action-packed thrill ride that is a Trojan horse for an earnest, if not especially nuanced, exploration of themes such as isolation and depression.
Indie creatives, assemble!
Schreier looks understandably exhausted on our video call (likely from hours of fielding similar questions to the ones I'm about to ask), but is otherwise affable and engaged.
He asks me about the guitars I have behind me, and he's so nice that I feel bad about cutting him off, but I only have 11 minutes of his time and I'd rather not spend three of them talking about the guitars in my study gathering more dust than Red Guardian's couch.
"[Thunderbolts*] takes place in such a short amount of time that it always felt like it could exist in its own kind of contained corner of the universe," Schreier says.
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Bringing in Schreier, best known for his work on Netflix hit series Beef (2023), was a good move for Marvel.
"From the moment I got hired," says Schreier, "[Marvel Studios president] Kevin [Feige] did come in and say, 'Yeah, take it and run with it. Make something different, take a different approach.'"
Of course, indie auteurs making Marvel movies is nothing new. Ang Lee (Hulk, 2003), Taika Waititi (Thor Ragnarok, 2017) and Chloe Zhao (Eternals, 2021), among others, have lent their talents to Marvel, with various levels of success.
What we've never seen is Marvel going to such lengths to make sure we know their new film is taking a different direction.
They even dropped an alternate trailer just to tell you that Thunderbolts* features the director and writers from Beef (Schreier, Lee Sung Jin, Joanna Calo), the cinematographer of The Green Knight (Andrew Droz Palermo), the production designer of Hereditary (Grace Yun), the editor of Minari (Harry Yun) and the composers of Everything Everywhere All At Once (Son Lux).
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That's an enviable creative team for any A24 film, and a breath of fresh air for Marvel.
The Avengers are not walking through that door
Part of the studio's challenge with their recent films is that many of the franchise's household names — such as Iron Man, Thor and Captain America (Steve Rogers) — have been taken off the board.
As main antagonist Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (played by the always brilliant Julia Louis-Dreyfus) says early in the film, "The Avengers are not walking through that door."
"It's got a lot of grit and it's very raw and it's ... like old-school Marvel," Louis-Dreyfus told Carson J Kelly.
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Thunderbolts* instead features a discount-store Black Widow (Pugh's Yelena) and cosplay Captain America (Russell's John Walker) among other B and C-level Marvel characters.
But the film cleverly leans into this. The Thunderbolts are not heroes. And rather than going too big picture, the film has the characters dealing with the small but very immediate concerns of their own personal safety, as they are also left to ponder the wisdom of their life choices and the consequences of past trauma.
Schreier says he was excited about this idea from the start.
"Those early discussions were just about how to flip the kind of expected narrative about a team of bad guys sent to do covert missions," he says.
"[It's] really more a story about people that were being discarded and sent to kill each other and sort of thrown away."
"On most of the Marvel films that I've worked on … it's always been very inclusive," Sebastian Stan told The Hollywood Reporter.
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And getting to play with lesser-known characters is an opportunity rather than a challenge, he says.
"You don't necessarily have that weight of expectation and you have some license to kind of take these characters in different places and tell new stories with them. And we really tried to embrace that, and use it to our advantage."
Light and shade
The film's most impressive achievement is that it's able to tread that fine line between playful and pathos. Thunderbolts* may be first-and-foremost a popcorn crowd-pleaser, but it also deals with some heavy themes — such as mental health, loneliness, loss, rejection and shame.
This is due in no small part to the excellent ensemble cast, all of whom are given scope to show their range. But it's Pugh's Yelena that particularly stands out.
"I think that she just really pops off the screen in almost everything that she does," Schreier says of Pugh.
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The English actor brings believable depth to a character that, up until now, had mostly been a Cold-War-era Russian stereotype.
"Actors like Florence can really give you all those sides of a character and can find the humour, even if it's coming from a dark place, so it doesn't just feel like the movie is flat or only living in darkness," Schreier says.
"You can feel like there's a texture to it that hopefully does feel earned when we get to those places."
But much of the credit should also go to Schreier and his team of indie cool creatives, who manage to keep all the balls in the air while telling a story that treads a little off the beaten path for the MCU.
"I was coming off of doing a show called Beef, where we explored a lot of the same themes, and [we] also found the tonal balance where there are really funny moments and also a lot of heartfelt moments and it goes to some dark places," Schreier says.
"I think that we always just believed that these stories didn't need to be niche stories anymore, that there was a universality to feeling like this, even if it seems like an odd fit for a big summer action movie."
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