SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for “Thunderbolts*,” now playing in theaters.
Marvel Studios is waisting no time spoiling the ending of its new summer tentpole “Thunderbolts*.” A giant billboard in Los Angeles promoting the Marvel movie got a massive facelift during the end of the film’s opening weekend as the title changed from “Thunderbolts*” to “*The New Avengers.”
Marvel fans had long been wondering why the official “Thunderbolts*” title included an asterisk. The answer is revealed in the third act of the movie, when Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) announces the group’s name is the New Avengers. The team includes Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Red Guardian (David Harbour), John Walker (Wyatt Russell); Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and Sentry (Lewis Pullman).
In the film’s post-credits scene, it’s revealed that the New Avengers are living in the old Avengers’ headquarters, now called the Watchtower. They’re also in a legal battle with Captain America (Anthony Mackie) over copyright infringement of the Avengers logo. “Captain America: Brave New World” ended with Mackie’s Sam Wilson heading out on a mission to reassemble the Avengers. The “Thunderbolts*” cast will be back in action next summer in “Avengers: Doomsday,” which is likely when the New Avengers are going to have to team up with the original Avengers, plus the Fantastic Four, in order to stop Robert Downey Jr.’s mega-villain.
The other major tease in the “Thunderbolts*” post-credits scene shows the Fantastic Four‘s spaceship entering Earth’s orbit from another dimension as their theme music plays. The film’s director, Jake Schreier, told Variety the scene was shot “maybe four weeks ago, and I did not direct that. That’s the Russos on the set of ‘Avengers: Doomsday.’ I got to be there, which was very fun, to watch your buddies go on to this grander scale.”
“We all worked on the scene just to make sure that it was honest to where our characters were,” he added. “But also, you’re giving them over to this whole new world and new scope, and you want them to function in that way. It was fun to see them directed in another context and on a different level of scope than we had been treating it.”
The next Marvel movie release is “Fantastic Four: The First Steps,” in theaters July 25.
