Marvel Studios is hoping lightning strikes twice.
Their latest film, “Thunderbolts*,” started out with an OK $162.1 million worldwide opening. That’s below February’s “Captain America: Brave New World.” But with vastly better reviews (88% on RottenTomatoes), the week-to-week drops should be lower.
Crossing its fingers, the film’s post-credits sequence suggests an ongoing life for the team of B-list MCU heroes, and reveals their actual name: The New Avengers.
Channeling the James Bond series, a hopeful message reads, “The New Avengers will return.”
Marvel even put out billboards days after the release appearing to change the title to “*The New Avengers.” And the ticketing website Fandango now displays a poster with the new moniker.
“If you want to [still] call it Thunderbolts*, that’s OK,” director Jake Schreier told EW.
“The asterisk was part of my last pitch meeting before getting the job. I thought it would be a small thing — we should have one sign, put an asterisk on it, and say, ‘Until we come up with something better.’
“And then they really ran with that and embraced that. And it felt like, at this studio, with the amount of attention on it, it’s a place where you could pull off something like that.”
The ragtag crew includes Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Red Guardian (David Harbour), John Walker (Wyatt Russell) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen). The name “Thunderbolts” came from Yelena’s youth soccer team.
At the end of the movie, the heroes save New York City from the clutches of Bob (Lewis Pullman), a k a Sentry, a lab-engineered super-solider who traps citizens inside a psychological prison called “The Void.”
Then, the Shifty CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis Dreyfus) takes credit for the victory, even though she’s responsible for Sentry’s creation.
The credits sequence also shows Sam Wilson, the newly minted Captain America, suing the group for using the Avengers name, since he’s trying to build his own band of successor heroes.
A fake New York Post front page, judging the quintet of misfits, blares “B-VENGERS: Best hope or big joke?”
The real Post certainly approved of the movie.
A three-star review said, “A funny-but-tortured femme-fatale performance from Florence Pugh as Russian assassin Yelena Belova, brutal and tactile fights and a merciful lack of confusing backstory makes for the most enjoyable MCU entry in a while.”
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All five actors are set to appear in “Avengers: Doomsday” next year. They’ll share the screen with previous Avengers such as Chris Hemsworth’s Thor and Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man.
Another challenge for the New Avengers in the end credits: a Fantastic Four-stamped ship is shown entering earth’s orbit. While it’s unclear if the Thunderbolts quintet will show up in July’s “Fantastic Four,” that movie is set during the 1960s.
But in the MCU, weirder things have happened.
