Marvel's Thunderbolts gets Beef-ed up with screenwriter Lee Sung Jin

Ahead of Beef’s premiere next week, Deadline has confirmed that several members from the Netflix show’s team will be reuniting on a decidedly non A24-backed project: Thunderbolts. Beef creator and showrunner Lee Sung Jin has joined the forthcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe installment as a screenwriter.

Lee is stepping up after Black Widow writer Eric Pearson wrote an initial draft and will be making his feature film debut after working on series including Tuca & Bertie, Dave, and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Thunderbolts will reunite him with Beef star Steven Yeun and director Jake Schreier, who helmed six of the show’s 10 episodes.

“I’m rewriting it,” Lee says in an interview with Variety. “It’s the whole squad again. Jake asked me if I would come on board. I probably should have taken a break, but there’s a lot of themes and exciting things about the movie that I couldn’t help but sign on.”

While plot details are under wraps, Thunderbolts will presumably deal with issues of morality and free will. The project brings together a variety of misfit antiheroes from across the Marvel franchise, lead by Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, whose nefarious intentions were previously revealed in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. With Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) already uncovering suspicions about her new boss in Hawkeye, the team will likely have to ask some hard questions.

“It’s truly an honor to be part of a Marvel thing, but it is very different,” Lee tells Variety. “One, it’s not my project, it’s Jake’s. It’s such a large scope and scale that the type of writing is very different. At the same time, the process feels the same, I’m still talking to Jake every day.”

Thunderbolts also co-stars Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Hannah John-Kamen, and Ayo Edebiri. It’s expected to go into production this June and hit theaters in July 2024.