It's not a secret: Marvel Studios did not have its best year in 2023. Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 3 was a highlight on the big screen, and the same could be said of Loki Season 2 on Disney+, but other titles (Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, Secret Invasion, and The Marvels) failed to live up to the franchises standards as far as quality and/or audience-draw. These are recent developments that haven't bypassed the attention of actor Wyatt Russell, but The Falcon And The Winter Solider star is assuring fans that there are good reasons to get excited for the upcoming Marvel movie Thunderbolts.
Russell was recently part of a Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters Q&A at 92NY (via The Hollywood Reporter), and he spoke a little bit about expectations for his first film in the Marvel Studios canon. Set to be directed by Jake Schreier, the movie is going to be going into production soon, and the performer reprising his role as John Walker/U.S. Agent has high hopes for the project even during what is perceived as a rough period for the MCU. Said Russell,
I have confidence it’s gonna be good. I know everybody is sort of on this Marvel train right now of things not going so well.
Thunderbolts was originally scheduled to go into production this past summer, but it ended up being delayed due to the labor strikes in the entertainment industry. This resulted in the film getting its release date pushed to its current July 2025 spot on the calendar. It will be the sixth film in Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Lee Sung Jin (the creator of the acclaimed Netflix series Beef) is writing the script.
While Thunderbolts will be Jake Schreier's first time in the director's chair for a blockbuster, he certainly has the full support of Wyatt Russell – who previously collaborated with the filmmaker on the series Lodge 49. Speaking specifically to his confidence in the movie's director, Russell told the audience,
I know Jake [Schreier] so well and I know how smart Jake is and how much he cares about making something interesting and different and utilizing everyone’s talents to the best of their ability. And the story that I think they’ve come up with is really interesting — I know parts of the story and how the story works, I can’t talk about it. But it’s not a straightforward Marvel movie as you’ve seen in the past.
The idea of Thunderbolts not being "straightforward" is a particularly interesting tease if you know the comic book history of the titular team. When the series was first created by Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley in 1997, the eponymous team was teased as a new lineup of heroes, but the last page of the first issue delivered the twist that the main protagonists were villains in disguise. It's unlikely/impossible that the film will have the exact same twist, as all of the main characters announced have been previously established in the MCU, but Wyatt Russell's comments suggest that there may be some surprises in store.
Russell is particularly interested in fans registering Thunderbolts as something different when it arrives in 2025, saying,
I think that it’s gonna be a lot of fun but I think it will be something that hopefully Marvel fans will look at and go, ‘Oh OK, this is a little different, let’s go hard at it.’ And as far as how we are approaching it, it’s time to go to work a little bit, it’s time to make a good Marvel movie, so let’s do that and work hard at it and don’t take things for granted.
In addition to Wyatt Russell, the stacked ensemble in Thunderbolts includes Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier), Olga Kurylenko (Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster), David Harbour (Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian), Hannah John-Kamen (Ava Starr/Ghost), Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Harrison Ford (Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross). Stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for the latest updates about the project as it gets closer to the start of production and its July 25, 2025 release date.
