Magical Girl Exchange

Figured I should write a post about this movie before I go see the next one.

Short Preamble About The Box Office

…I’m so surprised this didn’t make more. It got much better reviews than Brave New World, but last I checked, it made about the same amount?

This more than anything has made me think these films are reaching a General MCU Audience. People aren’t thinking “does this individual film/premise/team/audience reaction sound good,” they’re thinking “am I the kind of person who goes to see every Marvel movie in theaters, or am I not?” And the pool of reliable-Marvel-moviegoers has only been shrinking over the past five years.

When The Marvels got a lukewarm response, it could’ve been any combination of racism, sexism, and the strike disrupting their usual promo tours. (The movie itself was excellent. None of the criticisms that people held up as Terrible Flaws ever made sense.) And when BNW got a lukewarm response, it could’ve been because the movie itself was Just Okay.

But Thunderbolts is another genuinely excellent movie! And it has multiple white guys in leading roles! So what gives?

I really wish this had come out years ago. Should’ve been the big team-up finale of Phase 4. Instead, in the meantime, the MCU burned a bunch of its regular viewers by making them sit through hot messes like Quantumania or MoM, and now even the real gems aren’t bringing them back.

Spoiler-Lite Actual Reaction

It’s good!

And specifically, it’s good in ways that cater to transformative media fandom, which you’d think would be a gift. The main characters are a Sad Blorbo Variety Pack. All of them are murderers with tragic backstories, mostly involving kidnapping and/or brainwashing. One has the extra burden of dealing with her overenthusiastic cringe dad, who is also a murderer with a tragic backstory. Everyone is trained in all kinds of cool deadly fighting styles, but completely incompetent at making friends. The premise is about forcing them to work together! The villains are “the embodiment of Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss” and “a floppy-haired man with a stutter and sweater paws who just wants to be a hero.” Everyone has a traumatic childhood and everyone needs a hug. A critical plot point hinges on how desperately they all need a hug!

It’s one of those movies with a big cast, and almost all of them started as secondary characters in somebody else’s movie/TV show — but the writing does a great job of re-introducing them, giving you regular tidibts of exposition and recap, in ways that fit organically with the banter the characters would be doing anyway. Bucky is a bit of an outlier — he’s the most well-established character here, they expect you to basically know what his deal is, they only drop enough tidbits to jog your memory. Based on audience reaction, I think that was the right call.

(This is the movie where he’s in Congress. They don’t even try to explain how or why he ran for Congress. He’s just kinda…there. He’s not good at it, he’s visibly not enjoying it, but he sure is there! You just have to go “I Guess???” and roll with it.)

There was one character who, based on the previews, everyone figured was going to die early on. They do, in fact, die early on. If you were personally invested in that character, and excited to see them get more screen time, that sucks. But in general…I do think it was a good writing choice. It’s not a cheap shock-value death! It fits right in with the plot and the themes! It’s “these characters are career assassins, any one of them could’ve gone out that quickly if they had a bad day, is it any wonder they’re all depressed nihilists right now?”

A lot of the plot is about MCU version of Sentry, whose comics backstory is basically a version of what the MCU did with Spider-Man in No Way Home: “he used to be friends with a bunch of the Avengers and personally involved in a ton of world-changing events, but then, for the safety of the universe, his whole existence had to be erased from everyone’s memories.” I’d love to see the version of the movie where MCU Sentry had that backstory too. It could’ve been so fun to see “a montage of pivotal scenes from Phases 1 through 3, now with this random new guy photoshopped in.” And think of all the novel-length “Sentry’s adventures as a critical part of the last 20 movies” fic epics it would’ve inspired.

On the other hand, I get why they didn’t want to just rehash NWH. And I do really like what they came up with instead. The characterization is well-rounded and compelling, the designs for his different forms/powers are original and striking. A big part of his deal is that he’s Cartoonishly Unbeatably Strong, which makes it all the better that they shake up the Marvel “big CGI-heavy final battle” formula, so the win has nothing to do with “who can hit the hardest.”

Between all the different team members, my favorite dynamic is Yelena and Bucky. They never say out loud “so, how ’bout that life as the childhood friend of an OG Avenger, whose iconic heroism you could never possibly live up to even if you didn’t spend all that time as a brainwashed tool of the supervillains, huh?”, but they bring this low-key sense of mutual understanding to all their conversations. Yelena settles naturally into a team-leader role over the course of the movie, while Bucky has the most experience being on a team of Actual Superheroes, which he translates into “advising Yelena about management stuff” in this quietly-supportive way. It’s great.

I know Marvel has a really spotty record of having characters stay friends/partners/teammates from one installment to the next…but I really hope the Thunderbolts (or whatever name they manage to hang onto in the future) stick together for another one.