THEY’RE NOT SUPER. THEY BARELY HAVE POWERS. BUT IN MARVEL’S THUNDERBOLTS*, A RAG-TAG GROUP OF UNHINGED MISFITS TEAM UP FOR A BERSERKER MISSION. BRACE YOURSELF...

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

WHEN IT COMES TO PUNCTUATION IN movie titles, the asterisk has been sorely underrated and shockingly underrepresented. Commas, we’ve had a few. You can’t move for question marks? And the less said about the proliferation of exclamation marks, the better! Punctuation is all the rage, or: how Hollywood learned to stop worrying and love the colon.

But the asterisk —the humble, simple, lovable asterisk —has had something of a raw deal. There’s that Woody Allen film whose name escapes us, but that was over 50 years ago. But now it’s the asterisk’s turn to shine, as Marvel Studios drops it into the title of the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. Here’s everything you wanted to know about Thunderbolts*, but were afraid to ask.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

WHEN THUNDERBOLTS* WAS FIRST announced at Comic-Con in July 2022, it was just plain old Thunderbolts. But it still caught the eye, as something of an unknown quantity: a team-up movie that would collect some of the less-heralded and little-seen characters in the MCU, characters who want a shot at redemption, and don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard. Characters like Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, sister of the late Natasha Romanoff, or Sebastian Stan’s Marvel mainstay, Bucky Barnes, or Yelena’s boorish but bighearted adoptive dad, Alexei Shostakov, aka Red Guardian (David Harbour), or Wyatt Russell’s disgraced former Captain America, John Walker.

The asterisk came later. Almost two years later, in fact, nonchalantly dropped after filming had begun in Atlanta. “We wanted to do something very different,” says executive producer Brian Chapek, “and capture people’s attention.”

Job done. Immediately, tongues started wagging about the significance of the asterisk, and what it portended. What could it mean? “I actually know,” laughs Pugh now. “But I’m not gonna tell you. I hold all the power.”

A recent Japanese poster for the movie suggested that the asterisk was merely a gag, with the Pratchettian punchline being, “The Avengers aren’t available.” But no. Surely that can’t be it. Surely it can’t be that unsatisfying a reveal. “I don’t think I can say anything,” teases the director, Jake Schreier. “I can say that it means something. There’s some general sense of what an asterisk means.”

“ IT’S THIS BADASS INDIE, A24-FEELING ASSASSIN MOVIE WITH MARVEL SUPERHEROES”

FLORENCE PUGH

Clockwise from main: Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and Bob (Lewis Pullman) see the light; Shadowy fixer Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus); Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) is on target; Sebastian Stan and director Jake Schreier on location.

Namely, it’s suggesting that there might be more to the title. One theory posits the notion that the asterisk means that Thunderbolts might not be the final name of the movie, or the team. After all, the Thunderbolts themselves will spend quite a bit of time arguing about what to call themselves, and ‘Thunderbolts’ might not win out. It might be something else; something that would be revealed at the end of the film. ‘Dark Avengers’, for instance. It wouldn’t be the first time that Marvel Studios has done this —the final title-card of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, for instance, changes the title of that show to Captain America And The Winter Soldier.