Don't worry, darling: Florence Pugh's Black Widow is starring in Marvel's Thunderbolts

Some big news for fans of comic book antiheroes, anti-villains, anti-what-have-you this afternoon, as Marvel confirmed at its big, long, incredibly exhausting D23 panel today that Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova will be starring in the upcoming Thunderbolts movie.

That’s good news, obviously, in so far as Yelena was one of the best parts of both the Black Widow movie and the Hawkeye TV show, and seeing her at the center of a crew of baddish people trying to do good—that’s basically the Thunderbolts hook, supervillains doing superhero stuff—is likely to make for plenty of fun. Especially since she’ll be reunited with her Black Widow co-star David Harbour, with Kevin Feige calling “the demented father-daughter relationship between Red Guardian and Yelena…obviously one of the best parts of the MCU.”

Also returning from Black Widow: Olga Kurylenko, whose Taskmaster will hopefully get a bit more to do than just be a glorified attack dog this time around. In fact, the film seems to be culling aggressively from the rougher edges of the MCU’s roster: The rest of the cast includes Wyatt Russell as Falcon And The Winter Soldier’s U.S. Agent, Ghost from the Ant-Man movies, and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, who, as Stan put it, has somehow become the most stable person on the team. They’re apparently going to be overseen by Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Countess, who kind of seems like she might end up being the Amanda Waller to this little Suicide Squad.

All told: A pretty intriguing premise, and a pretty prominently stacked cast. We’ll have to wait and see if the team’s chemistry lives up to the hype when the Thunderbolts movie makes its way into theaters in July of 2024.