It’s still well over a year until Thunderbolts is ‘supposedly’ coming out, and yet fans have already started nit-picking the non-existent film.
Listen, we’ve had a rough couple of years. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Thor: Love and Thunder and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness haven’t exactly set the world on fire, but that doesn’t mean we should start giving up on these films before they’ve even begun filming. In a post on Reddit, one user asked fellow fans what character they would change from the Thunderbolts line-up to ‘fix’ the movie.
Surprisingly, many actually had a lot of suggestions. Nothing’s been confirmed yet, so these ‘fixes’ are really addressing problems that might not even end up in the film. For example, one fan criticized having Sentry as a villain, despite that being a rumor at this stage. Does it make the criticism any less valid? Suppose not, but we don’t even know if he’s even in the film yet.
“If the rumors are true and Sentry is the antagonist. I have no idea how they stop him. He would sneeze and kill this entire team.”
Others were more critical of the fact that the usually diverse and interesting rogues gallery had been reduced to a bunch of similar feeling characters.
“Most of them are just variations of captain America.”
And some fans just wanted a more comic-accurate portrayal.
“Baron Zemo as the team’s leader
Val as the Nick Fury-type person
Justin Hammer as the team‘s financial and tech support
Abomination
Taskmaster (Val repurposed a prototype Taskmaster chip she recovered somewhere and implanted it into Tony Masters)
Ghost
Songbird
Either Radioactive Man, Absorbing Man, Blizzard, or Whirlwind”
A few spoke sense and pointed out the madness of these hypothetical problems and solutions.
“why are you trying to fix something that doesn’t exist and you haven’t seen yet”
Regardless, all this shows just how truly pessimistic the Marvel fan base has become. We’ve had a couple of years of disappointing films and TV series and now it’s all doom and gloom. The fanbase is preemptively trying to fix a movie that might not even be broken.
Although we can’t place all the blame on Marvel Studios’ recent poor quality control. The fact is, fans like to complain. Even the most perfect comic book movies have their detractors, whether it be straying from the source material or just not living up to expectations, Marvel fanatics are notoriously hard to please. Think about the uproar surrounding Robert Downey Jr.’s casting as Iron Man months before the film came out. The fandom has always had a negative mindset and the same remains true to this day.