section_path: Production/Pre-production
section_name: Pre-production
paragraph_text: Pre-production
  
  In September 2022, Justin Kroll of Deadline Hollywood described the film as a spin-off for Belova because she was expected to lead the antihero team, with Pugh and Russell believed to be reprising their roles, along with the inclusion of Brühl. At the D23 Expo later that month, Pugh, Russell, John-Kamen, and Louis-Dreyfus were confirmed to star, alongside Sebastian Stan as Barnes, David Harbour as Red Guardian, and Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster, all reprising their roles from previous MCU projects. Pugh was set to be paid eight figures for Thunderbolts and another MCU film. Prior to the cast announcement for the team, commentators had also suggested it could have included characters such as Abomination or Clint Barton. Schreier compared the character dynamics to those in the films Reservoir Dogs (1992), Ronin (1998), and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011), which are all about a "mis-matched team forced to work together". He also pointed to a less-likely inspiration in the film Toy Story 3 (2010), saying the Thunderbolts members are all facing obsolescence like the Toy Story characters are in that film. Harbour said the film would be unique in the MCU, describing the main cast as "a bunch of misfits and outcasts and losers and people who don't really live up to the super in superhero". Pugh said the joy of uniting these characters was that they "don't play well together", while Russell expressed confidence that the film would be interesting, fun, and not a "straightforward" Marvel film. Journalist Jeff Sneider reported that Pearson's script focused too much on the characters returning from Black Widow, which he also wrote, and Marvel Studios was looking for the other characters to have a more equitable role so it would feel like an ensemble film. Schreier did not believe the film was a Black Widow sequel but rather "a sampling of people from different parts" of the MCU, acknowledging the writers pulled from all of their histories, including Belova and Shostakov's relationship that was established in Black Widow. One of Pearson's drafts started the film with a scene of Belova confronting de Fontaine about sending her to kill Barton, furthering the storyline that was established in the post-credits scene of Black Widow and continued in the Disney+ series Hawkeye (2021); Pearson said their confrontation helped emphasize de Fontaine's manipulation but ultimately was not relevant to the larger story being told.
  
  Ayo Edebiri joined the cast in January 2023 as de Fontaine's assistant Mel, when Louis-Dreyfus said filming would begin that June. In February, Steven Yeun was cast as Sentry with the potential to continue in future MCU films. Yeun worked with Schreier on the Netflix series Beef (2023–present), and the director had the actor in mind when adding the character. The next month, Beef creator Lee Sung Jin revealed that he was rewriting the script at Schreier's request and said there were "a lot of themes and exciting things" that drew him to the project. He worked closely with Schreier on the script and noted that, unlike Beef, Thunderbolts was Schreier's project and had different writing needs than the series, given the film's large scope and scale. With the team largely consistent, Schreier worked in subsequent drafts to "go deeper" with the characters "on the margins" such as Mel and Congressman Gary and " their arcs together into something that would feel resonant".
  
  At the start of May 2023, filming was delayed due to the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike and was planned to resume after the strike concluded. In June, the release date was pushed back to December 20, 2024, and the Utah Film Commission announced that Thunderbolts would film in Emery County and Grand County, Utah, spending over $4.5 million in the state. Chapek said the "grounded, globe-trotting film" would use several practical filming locations and the Utah locations were chosen because they felt "untouched by the larger world". Sanja Milkovic Hays was the costume designer after working on the MCU films Captain Marvel (2019) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). When the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike ended in November, the release date was pushed back again, this time to July 25, 2025. Upon returning from the strike, Schreier and the creatives were able to reexamine the script. They determined that there was no sense of "tension and unpredictability", and the film felt "bloodless" when there should be the tension of not knowing who would survive, given who these characters are. To solve this, they decided to rework Taskmaster's involvement in the film, killing the character "early and dry" in the film to have her death "resonate" and inform the fates of the other characters throughout the rest of the film. Having the death occur later in the film was also discussed, but Schreier said the sadness from it would "hang over" the rest of the film and distract from the intended storyline of forming a strong bond between Belova and Bob.: 0:55–3:55 In Pearson's original draft, Taskmaster survived until the end and had a sub-plot where she bonded with Ghost, as well as a recurring joke where she kept forgetting she had made friends with the other characters and was still trying to assassinate Walker. Pearson understood why the decision was made to kill Taskmaster, also believing the memory loss assassination joke drifted too close to Bob's character arc as he also was dealing with memory loss. Additionally, his post-credit scene featuring Kang the Conqueror was abandoned because Marvel Studios had decided to move away from that storyline.
  
  Following the strike-caused production delays, filming was slated to begin around March or April 2024. Yeun exited in January 2024 due to a scheduling issue caused by the delayed production, but expressed interest in working on a future MCU film. It was unclear if Marvel would recast or rethink Yeun's role, but at the end of the month Lewis Pullman was revealed to be the studios' top choice to replace Yeun as Sentry, and his casting was soon confirmed. Geraldine Viswanathan was cast to replace Edebiri as Mel after she exited due to the delays. In February, the release date was moved forward to May 2, 2025, swapping places with the MCU film The Fantastic Four: First Steps. By the end of the month, Joanna Calo had joined to serve as the writer during production and was rewriting the script. For the film's final writing credits, Pearson was credited for the story and received a screenplay credit alongside Calo, while additional off-screen literary material was attributed to Lee.
  
  The script explores mental health, specifically loneliness and depression, particularly with Bob / Sentry. Pearson always envisioned ending the film with the emotional moment of giving someone a hug rather than fighting them. Before Sentry was added to the film, Walker was intended to be the main antagonist, with de Fontaine manipulating him into believing his super soldier serum was wearing off and giving him pills as a solution, making him into a "time bomb" that made him more unlikable and "the monster". Pearson said this version "didn't ever totally work", and Walker's actions felt too similar to the plot line of Thaddeus Ross becoming the Red Hulk in the MCU film Captain America: Brave New World (2025); Pearson had considered Red Hulk for the film's villain early in the process, which Marvel Studios declined because of their intended plans for Brave New World. Looking for a new antagonist that would not easily be beatable in a fight, Pearson remembered reading the Sentry miniseries years prior and felt Sentry and his alter ego the Void would work for "heroic ambition and self-esteem versus depression and self-loathing and loneliness and isolation"; he called Sentry "the entire journey for our heroes rolled into one entity" and his inclusion helped make the story cohesive. Pearson was glad he was able to incorporate many elements of the character's comics backstory to fit into the MCU. Said backstory, consisting of Sentry erasing himself from the world's memories to stop the Void, was avoided because it was similar to the plot of No Way Home, in which Peter Parker / Spider-Man also has himself erased from memory. Paul Jenkins, co-creator of Sentry, discussed the character with the creatives, with Schreier calling Sentry and the work Jenkins did with the character "a parable for mental health". Schreier explained that Lee felt mental health discussion was "not niche anymore" and it allowed them to "tell a story about that internality and still have a lot of comedy and action for something that feels big and universal".
  
  The Thunderbolts* team believed the film was a good opportunity to further explore ideas they had started to explore in Beef on a larger scale. Executive producer Brian Chapek came up with the idea that, to defeat Sentry, the Thunderbolts would have to enter the Void, which manifested memories of their greatest shame, dubbed "shame rooms". Lee worked closely with production designer Grace Yun, who also served that role on Beef, to create the initial specifics of each room. Pearson had originally envisioned them as "ethereal and dreamy" but believed making them mazes akin to those seen in the film Being John Malkovich (1999) helped with visualizing the concept and made them feel "more unsettling". Calo further enhanced the shame rooms, suggesting that when Belova enters to Void to help Bob that she return to her initial room seen earlier in the film. Schreier explained that this made a "callback of the idea that the greatest shame of all was thinking that you could be something bigger than yourself, that aspirations towards heroism are actually what brings everything down and that you need to learn to be ok with who you are without that". Shame rooms for Belova, Walker, and de Fontaine are visible, with rooms for the other characters conceived for the film's finale, allowing the team to escape through them. However, Calo felt strongly that to journey to the heart of the Void, there needed to be a " Big Bad moment" beforehand, and the team should journey through Bob's shame rooms. The other shame rooms included: Shostakov being thrown in the gulag; Ghost growing up in an orphanage with no one wanting to be around her; and multiple different ones for Bucky that were "a little less than the expected idea", including a "shameful moment" in the Boy Scouts.
  
  Schreier had suggested during his pitch meeting that one of the film's posters or trailers should use an asterisk in the title to imply they needed to "come up with something better"; Feige, Marvel Studios co-president Louis D'Esposito, and the marketing team loved this idea and decided to fully embrace it for the title and marketing campaign;: 4:26–5:15 with the film formally retitled to Thunderbolts* by March 2024. This allowed the creatives to realize that having the asterisk could lead to the reveal of a new title for the film once it was released,: 4:26–5:15 which was subsequently done, changing the title to The New Avengers after the ending reveals the Thunderbolts to be the New Avengers. Schreier said the ending was always going to have the Thunderbolts revealed as the New Avengers team, and the rest of the film became about "building the right story that lived up to that". Pearson explained that Feige suggesting de Fontaine should introduce the Thunderbolts to the public as the Avengers; additional discussions were had on what this meant, such as if the "n" in "new" should be upper or lowercase, and what the implications of each decision would mean. Thunderbolts* included "little hints" throughout so the ending did not come as a total surprise – such as the Battle of New York gala, Avengers Tower becoming the Watchtower, and Mel explaining how she was in high school when the Avengers first formed. Additionally, the credits and the post-credit sequences acknowledge that the New Avengers is "not necessarily the most comfortable or perfect fit" for these characters. The original Thunderbolts name was derived from Belova's youth soccer team.
  
  In September 2022, Justin Kroll of Deadline Hollywood described the film as a spin-off for Belova because she was expected to lead the antihero team, with Pugh and Russell believed to be reprising their roles, along with the inclusion of Brühl. At the D23 Expo later that month, Pugh, Russell, John-Kamen, and Louis-Dreyfus were confirmed to star, alongside Sebastian Stan as Barnes, David Harbour as Red Guardian, and Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster, all reprising their roles from previous MCU projects. Pugh was set to be paid eight figures for Thunderbolts and another MCU film. Prior to the cast announcement for the team, commentators had also suggested it could have included characters such as Abomination or Clint Barton. Schreier compared the character dynamics to those in the films Reservoir Dogs (1992), Ronin (1998), and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011), which are all about a "mis-matched team forced to work together". He also pointed to a less-likely inspiration in the film Toy Story 3 (2010), saying the Thunderbolts members are all facing obsolescence like the Toy Story characters are in that film. Harbour said the film would be unique in the MCU, describing the main cast as "a bunch of misfits and outcasts and losers and people who don't really live up to the super in superhero". Pugh said the joy of uniting these characters was that they "don't play well together", while Russell expressed confidence that the film would be interesting, fun, and not a "straightforward" Marvel film. Journalist Jeff Sneider reported that Pearson's script focused too much on the characters returning from Black Widow, which he also wrote, and Marvel Studios was looking for the other characters to have a more equitable role so it would feel like an ensemble film. Schreier did not believe the film was a Black Widow sequel but rather "a sampling of people from different parts" of the MCU, acknowledging the writers pulled from all of their histories, including Belova and Shostakov's relationship that was established in Black Widow. One of Pearson's drafts started the film with a scene of Belova confronting de Fontaine about sending her to kill Barton, furthering the storyline that was established in the post-credits scene of Black Widow and continued in the Disney+ series Hawkeye (2021); Pearson said their confrontation helped emphasize de Fontaine's manipulation but ultimately was not relevant to the larger story being told.
  
  Ayo Edebiri joined the cast in January 2023 as de Fontaine's assistant Mel, when Louis-Dreyfus said filming would begin that June. In February, Steven Yeun was cast as Sentry with the potential to continue in future MCU films. Yeun worked with Schreier on the Netflix series Beef (2023–present), and the director had the actor in mind when adding the character. The next month, Beef creator Lee Sung Jin revealed that he was rewriting the script at Schreier's request and said there were "a lot of themes and exciting things" that drew him to the project. He worked closely with Schreier on the script and noted that, unlike Beef, Thunderbolts was Schreier's project and had different writing needs than the series, given the film's large scope and scale. With the team largely consistent, Schreier worked in subsequent drafts to "go deeper" with the characters "on the margins" such as Mel and Congressman Gary and " their arcs together into something that would feel resonant".
  
  At the start of May 2023, filming was delayed due to the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike and was planned to resume after the strike concluded. In June, the release date was pushed back to December 20, 2024, and the Utah Film Commission announced that Thunderbolts would film in Emery County and Grand County, Utah, spending over $4.5 million in the state. Chapek said the "grounded, globe-trotting film" would use several practical filming locations and the Utah locations were chosen because they felt "untouched by the larger world". Sanja Milkovic Hays was the costume designer after working on the MCU films Captain Marvel (2019) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). When the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike ended in November, the release date was pushed back again, this time to July 25, 2025. Upon returning from the strike, Schreier and the creatives were able to reexamine the script. They determined that there was no sense of "tension and unpredictability", and the film felt "bloodless" when there should be the tension of not knowing who would survive, given who these characters are. To solve this, they decided to rework Taskmaster's involvement in the film, killing the character "early and dry" in the film to have her death "resonate" and inform the fates of the other characters throughout the rest of the film. Having the death occur later in the film was also discussed, but Schreier said the sadness from it would "hang over" the rest of the film and distract from the intended storyline of forming a strong bond between Belova and Bob.: 0:55–3:55 In Pearson's original draft, Taskmaster survived until the end and had a sub-plot where she bonded with Ghost, as well as a recurring joke where she kept forgetting she had made friends with the other characters and was still trying to assassinate Walker. Pearson understood why the decision was made to kill Taskmaster, also believing the memory loss assassination joke drifted too close to Bob's character arc as he also was dealing with memory loss. Additionally, his post-credit scene featuring Kang the Conqueror was abandoned because Marvel Studios had decided to move away from that storyline.
  
  Following the strike-caused production delays, filming was slated to begin around March or April 2024. Yeun exited in January 2024 due to a scheduling issue caused by the delayed production, but expressed interest in working on a future MCU film. It was unclear if Marvel would recast or rethink Yeun's role, but at the end of the month Lewis Pullman was revealed to be the studios' top choice to replace Yeun as Sentry, and his casting was soon confirmed. Geraldine Viswanathan was cast to replace Edebiri as Mel after she exited due to the delays. In February, the release date was moved forward to May 2, 2025, swapping places with the MCU film The Fantastic Four: First Steps. By the end of the month, Joanna Calo had joined to serve as the writer during production and was rewriting the script. For the film's final writing credits, Pearson was credited for the story and received a screenplay credit alongside Calo, while additional off-screen literary material was attributed to Lee.
  
  The script explores mental health, specifically loneliness and depression, particularly with Bob / Sentry. Pearson always envisioned ending the film with the emotional moment of giving someone a hug rather than fighting them. Before Sentry was added to the film, Walker was intended to be the main antagonist, with de Fontaine manipulating him into believing his super soldier serum was wearing off and giving him pills as a solution, making him into a "time bomb" that made him more unlikable and "the monster". Pearson said this version "didn't ever totally work", and Walker's actions felt too similar to the plot line of Thaddeus Ross becoming the Red Hulk in the MCU film Captain America: Brave New World (2025); Pearson had considered Red Hulk for the film's villain early in the process, which Marvel Studios declined because of their intended plans for Brave New World. Looking for a new antagonist that would not easily be beatable in a fight, Pearson remembered reading the Sentry miniseries years prior and felt Sentry and his alter ego the Void would work for "heroic ambition and self-esteem versus depression and self-loathing and loneliness and isolation"; he called Sentry "the entire journey for our heroes rolled into one entity" and his inclusion helped make the story cohesive. Pearson was glad he was able to incorporate many elements of the character's comics backstory to fit into the MCU. Said backstory, consisting of Sentry erasing himself from the world's memories to stop the Void, was avoided because it was similar to the plot of No Way Home, in which Peter Parker / Spider-Man also has himself erased from memory. Paul Jenkins, co-creator of Sentry, discussed the character with the creatives, with Schreier calling Sentry and the work Jenkins did with the character "a parable for mental health". Schreier explained that Lee felt mental health discussion was "not niche anymore" and it allowed them to "tell a story about that internality and still have a lot of comedy and action for something that feels big and universal".
  
  The Thunderbolts* team believed the film was a good opportunity to further explore ideas they had started to explore in Beef on a larger scale. Executive producer Brian Chapek came up with the idea that, to defeat Sentry, the Thunderbolts would have to enter the Void, which manifested memories of their greatest shame, dubbed "shame rooms". Lee worked closely with production designer Grace Yun, who also served that role on Beef, to create the initial specifics of each room. Pearson had originally envisioned them as "ethereal and dreamy" but believed making them mazes akin to those seen in the film Being John Malkovich (1999) helped with visualizing the concept and made them feel "more unsettling". Calo further enhanced the shame rooms, suggesting that when Belova enters to Void to help Bob that she return to her initial room seen earlier in the film. Schreier explained that this made a "callback of the idea that the greatest shame of all was thinking that you could be something bigger than yourself, that aspirations towards heroism are actually what brings everything down and that you need to learn to be ok with who you are without that". Shame rooms for Belova, Walker, and de Fontaine are visible, with rooms for the other characters conceived for the film's finale, allowing the team to escape through them. However, Calo felt strongly that to journey to the heart of the Void, there needed to be a " Big Bad moment" beforehand, and the team should journey through Bob's shame rooms. The other shame rooms included: Shostakov being thrown in the gulag; Ghost growing up in an orphanage with no one wanting to be around her; and multiple different ones for Bucky that were "a little less than the expected idea", including a "shameful moment" in the Boy Scouts.
  
  Schreier had suggested during his pitch meeting that one of the film's posters or trailers should use an asterisk in the title to imply they needed to "come up with something better"; Feige, Marvel Studios co-president Louis D'Esposito, and the marketing team loved this idea and decided to fully embrace it for the title and marketing campaign;: 4:26–5:15 with the film formally retitled to Thunderbolts* by March 2024. This allowed the creatives to realize that having the asterisk could lead to the reveal of a new title for the film once it was released,: 4:26–5:15 which was subsequently done, changing the title to The New Avengers after the ending reveals the Thunderbolts to be the New Avengers. Schreier said the ending was always going to have the Thunderbolts revealed as the New Avengers team, and the rest of the film became about "building the right story that lived up to that". Pearson explained that Feige suggesting de Fontaine should introduce the Thunderbolts to the public as the Avengers; additional discussions were had on what this meant, such as if the "n" in "new" should be upper or lowercase, and what the implications of each decision would mean. Thunderbolts* included "little hints" throughout so the ending did not come as a total surprise – such as the Battle of New York gala, Avengers Tower becoming the Watchtower, and Mel explaining how she was in high school when the Avengers first formed. Additionally, the credits and the post-credit sequences acknowledge that the New Avengers is "not necessarily the most comfortable or perfect fit" for these characters. The original Thunderbolts name was derived from Belova's youth soccer team.