According to the latest word on the street, Marvel’s recent decision to undertake a massive rewrite of their upcoming Thunderbolts was prompted by the original script’s misguided focus towards its central characters.
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The Thunderbolts’ return to boot camp was first revealed on March 29th by the film’s new writer, Beef showrunner Lee Sung Jin, during an interview given to Variety in promotion of his new Netflix dramedy.
“I’m rewriting it,” Lee bluntly told the entertainment news outlet. “It’s the whole squad again,” he added, referring to the fact that both Beef director Jake Schreier and actor Steven Yeun have signed on to serve in the same capacities on Thunderbolts. “Jake asked me if I would come on board. I probably should have taken a break, but there’s a lot of themes and exciting things about the movie that I couldn’t help but sign on.”
“It’s truly an honor to be part of a Marvel thing, but it is very different,” added Lee. “One, it’s not my project, it’s Jake’s. It’s such a large scope and scale that the type of writing is very different. At the same time, the process feels the same, I’m still talking to Jake every day.”
“I think once you find the squad of people you love and trust and are so talented, you do everything you can to keep working with them,” he concluded.
While neither Marvel nor Sin provided any insight into why exactly the studio had chosen to rework the anti-hero team-up film, film reporter Jeff Sneider subsequently detailed that, according to his sources, the film was being rewritten because it spent far too much time focused on the film’s returning Black Widow characters rather than the eponymous team as a whole.
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“I heard that they scrapped the other guy’s [Black Widow writer Eric Pearson] draft,” he explained during the March 30th episode of his and film critic John Rocha’s The Hot Mic podcast. “One of the problems with that Thunderbolts draft was that it had the similar problem that Suicide Squad had, the David Ayer one, where it was too focused on the Black Widow characters who are going to be in Thunderbolts and it wasn’t equal enough for the team. It just very much emphasized the characters we already knew.”
Given the confirmed roster for the MCU’s version of the Thunderbolts, it seems Pearson’s take on the team would have seen Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Red Guardian (David Harbour), and the gender-swapped Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) taking center stage over Bucky (Sebastian Stan), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell).
Thunderbolts is currently set to strike theater screens on July 26th, 2024.
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