Review: 'Thunderbolts*' (Amusingly) Forces The Marvel Machine To Confront Its Declining Pop Culture Relevance

This latest MCU action comedy is both a return to good-enough form and an on-point metaphor for Disney's Marvel Studios wrestling with so-called superhero fatigue

Thunderbolts (2025)
126 minutes
Rated PG-13 for “strong violence, language, thematic elements, and some suggestive and drug references”
Director - Jake Schreier
Writers - Eric Pearson, Joanna Calo and Kurt Busiek
Producer - Kevin Feige
Starring - Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Geraldine Viswanathan, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, Wendell Pierce and Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Cinematography - Andrew Droz Palermo
Editing - Angela Catanzaro and Harry Yoon
Music - Son Lux
Produced by Marvel Studios
Opening theatrically the week of May 2, courtesy of Walt Disney Studios

To my slight surprise, my 17-year-old wanted to see Thunderbolts*. She seems to have ingested some of the online-specific discourse narratives about even the first four “phases” being overly interconnected, but because she likes Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova. She had a perfectly fine time, partially because the film is, more than anything else, a Yelena vehicle with the rest of the C-level rejects offering sustained support. Marvel’s biggest strength was never its interconnectivity or even its promise of an overarching narrative arc. It was the presumed promise of (regardless of my own subjective critical opinion of each film) a certain level of nuts-and-bolts blockbuster action comedy quality, headlined by good actors playing charming and entertaining would-be superheroes. That’s what Thunderbolts* is, along with being a metaphor for Marvel’s declining cultural relevance amid an era of so-called “superhero fatigue.”