The MCU is about to get its new team-up with Thunderbolts, but one person you definitely won’t be seeing is Baron Zemo. While the new movie shares its name with the comic, it isn’t a direct adaptation of the original team.
In the Marvel comics, the Thunderbolts were first introduced as a group of supervillains posing as heroes, with Beetle as MACH-1, Goliath as Atlas, Moonstone as Meteorite, Screaming Mimi as Songbird, and Fixer as Techno.
However, the big screen version includes the likes of Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), US Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Red Guardian (David Harbour).
But what about their dastardly leader, Baron Zemo? Dexerto caught up with Thunderbolts director Jake Schreier to ask whether there was ever a world in which the Avenger-hating villain was in the new movie.
Why Baron Zemo won’t be in the MCU’s Thunderbolts
“There was no version that I was presented with where that was ever true, from the first draft that I read,” Schreier told us. “There are like a few character shifts since then, but not so much, and Baron Zemo was not in there.”
The filmmaker went on to say, “I know some corners of the internet are not so happy about that.”
While there has been disappointment about Zemo’s absence, given the MCU’s recent trajectory, it made more sense to have Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) step in as the orchestrator behind the superhero team.
She’s been slowly assembling this group behind the scenes in other projects, making her a natural fit for the role Zemo once played in the comics.
Plus, Zemo has already appeared in both Captain America: Civil War and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, where he was played by Daniel Brühl. Bringing him back might have felt like a step backwards for a team trying to forge a new identity.
And the antiheroes of the MCU’s Thunderbolts have established backstories, making them well-placed to take on the new mantle.
“It’s funny because I know there’s other corners of the internet that wish that this was more that first run of Thunderbolts where it’s, you know, villains masquerading as heroes,” added Schreier.
“And I think our movie is meant, in some ways, to kind of honor that idea, but coming at it from a different angle.”
Thunderbolts hits UK cinemas on May 1 and US cinemas on May 2. Until then, read about Sentry/The Void, check out every upcoming MCU title, and take a look at our ranking of the MCU’s movies.
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