It’s learned the idea to make the Thunderbolts the MCU’s New Avengers came from head of Marvel, Kevin Feige.
If you have been stuck under a rock, Monday saw the marketing for Thunderbolts switch gears where they changed the title to New Avengers.
New posters were released, billboards have been updated, Marvel posted new videos on social media, the cast revealed the changes, and even Sebastian Stan took to the wild to put up a new Winter Soldier New Avengers poster.
Spoilers: New Avengers came about at the end of Thunderbolts. It doesn’t have anything to do with the movie and really only comes into play with the post-credit scene that teases the Fantastic Four. Where does it go from there? Well, only in Avengers: Doomsday.
Update: Following the rebrand and retitle, New Avengers bombs at the box office on Monday. Its first Tuesday is also the fifth-lowest in MCU history.
Update #2: Signaling Feige’s M-She-U has been a big bust, Disney is re-releasing Snow White in theaters for Mother’s Day weekend, competing with Thunderbolts.
Feige’s New Avengers Move Feels Like a Desperate Marketing Gimmick
There’s some controversy surrounding the change as it suggests Marvel had zero faith in “Thunderbolts” if the plan all along was to make them the “New Avengers,” which is obviously a lot more marketable.
Comic book fans might also be on the fence as the MCU’s version is a shadow of what the New Avengers were in the comics (Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Sentry, etc.).
So it seems like it’s a desperate attempt by Kevin Feige to sell the MCU audience the Thunderbolts movie which is another MCU movie to have bombed in its opening, actually the second lowest MCU opening off all time when you factor in inflation.
Kevin Feige Personally Pushed the New Avengers Rebrand
So it’s no surprise to learn that Kevin Feige came up with the idea to make the Thunderbolts the New Avengers. Thunderbolts co-writer Eric Pearson filled in THR:
That was a Kevin [Feige] thing. I told him I wanted to do a Thunderbolts movie and the way in was going to be through Yelena bringing them together against Valentina. I tried one pitch that didn’t work, and the second pitch was very, very close to the movie that we have now. I ended the pitch with Yelena whispering in Valentina’s ear, “You work for us now,” essentially. So I pitched that Valentina is forced to introduce the Thunderbolts [to the public], and Kevin said, “I think that she should call them the Avengers.” And I was like, “Whoa, okay!”
That was his one big note from the pitch, and when you get one note from a Marvel pitch, you get out of there. So I was like, “Okay, cool. I don’t know what your plan is for the New Avengers.” And then there were many, many discussions: “Capital N? Lowercase n? Are they Avengers that are new? Are they the New Avengers?” But that was Kevin’s idea, and it’s part of some four-dimensional chess plan that I don’t totally know yet.
Feige’s Post-Endgame MCU Has Been One Failure After Another
Kevin Feige has made a lot of questionable decisions about the MCU post-Endgame.
He let it go in a creative direction that fans haven’t liked with the M-She-U, he hired questionable creatives, the MCU has been disconnected, the Disney+ shows have been a disaster, and Feige has had a string of failures on the big screen including Black Widow, Eternals, Shang-Chi, Quantumania, The Marvels, Captain America: Brave New World, and now it’s looking like Thunderbolts.
A recent report by the WSJ said Feige is overhauling Marvel, but after wrecking the MCU, maybe Feige needs to be overhauled?
