Marvel's Thunderbolts* teaser valiantly refuses to give away the plot

Marvel is really trying to drum up a sense of mystery around Thunderbolts*, starting with the asterisk at the end of the title. The first Thunderbolts teaser trailer doesn’t give much away, so maybe we really won’t know its twists until the movie premieres on May 2, 2025. Until then, you can enjoy a teaser that actually just teases, for once.

Here’s the bare bones of what we know about Thunderbolts*: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) is assembling a misfit team of powered individuals for reasons that are unclear but likely nefarious (at least, based on the antagonistic vibe Val has given in all her previous appearances). This team is led by Yelena (Florence Pugh), the “younger sister” of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. The vibe is Suicide Squad meets Guardians Of The Galaxy, where none of the characters are “heroes” in the traditional sense (and somebody might be trying to take them out). Instead, they’re all people who have “done bad things,” as Yelena observes in the teaser. 

The Thunderbolts* team is a bit of a risk both in-universe and out—it requires some deep-cut Marvel Cinematic Universe knowledge to understand where these misfits are coming from. Most of the characters originate from Marvel’s Disney+ output: Yelena, Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) are all from Black Widow, while Allegra and John Walker (Wyatt Russell) first appeared in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier. There’s also Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) from Ant-Man And The Wasp and Lewis Pullman as a new character called “Bob.” (In all likelihood, he’s playing Sentry, a Marvel Comics character who accidentally gets powers when he consumes an untested version of super soldier serum while looking for drugs.) They’re anchored by MCU mainstay Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), who works both for and against the team, as evidenced by him trying to blow up their vehicle at the end of the teaser. 

What is the Thunderbolts’ mission? What are Val’s goals? How is Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford, next seen transforming into Red Hulk in Captain America: Brave New World) involved, if at all? The Thunderbolts teaser doesn’t have answers, and hopefully any subsequent trailer will preserve some of the mystery. We’ve already got the Pixies “Where Is My Mind” trailer cliché here, we don’t need to add the “gives the whole plot away” on top. Done well, this could be another Guardians for Marvel, in terms of elevating secondary comic characters to main-character status. But, as the tagline goes, “Be careful who you assemble.”