The Only Thunderbolts Recap You Need Before Avengers: Doomsday

Yelena Belova's (Florence Pugh) team of outcasts-turned-celebrated heroes will likely be very busy for the foreseeable future. However, it wasn't always that way, and watching Looper's video above will fill you in on how difficult things used to be for the Thunderbolts. 

2025's "Thunderbolts*" is a solid Marvel movie about a disastrous team, and the asterisk at the end of the title is ultimately revealed to indicate their true name, the New Avengers. This was a major revelation, considering the group's less than heroic makeup: Every single member has operated on the wrong side of the law at one point or another, after all. This references the comic book version of Thunderbolts, which is often depicted as a super team comprised of (more or less) reformed supervillains. 

As a "Thunderbolts*"post-credits scene explains, the New Avengers enjoy a fairly difficult relationship with Captain America's (Anthony Mackie) own impending version of the Avengers. This is an interesting dynamic that will no doubt be in play when "Avengers: Doomsday" drops. 

The Thunderbolts/New Avengers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are a strange bunch. Their leader is Yelena Belova, Natasha Romanoff's (Scarlett Johansson) sister and fellow former Black Widow with a long history of black ops missions. There's Bucky Barnes, a high-powered politician who used to terrorize the world as the brainwashed assassin Winter Soldier. Ava "Ghost" Starr (Hannah John-Kamen) was the tragic antagonist of "Ant-Man and the Wasp" with intangibility powers, and John "U.S. Agent" Walker (Wyatt Russell) broke bad big time as Rogers' replacement Captain America on the Disney+ show "Falcon and the Winter Soldier." Finally, there's Yelena's bombastic father figure Alexei "Red Guardian" Shostakov (David Harbour), a Russian super soldier and former sleeper agent in the U.S. 

Combine them with the team's troubled outlier member Bob "Sentry" Reynolds (Lewis Pullman) — an immensely powerful figure whose dark side, Void, is an invincible weapon of mass destruction that terrorizes New York City in "Thunderbolts*" — and our New Avengers are a truly peculiar team even by MCU standards. Before helping "Avengers: Doomsday" blow away the box office on December 18, 2026, be sure to watch Looper's video above.