Zemo (Daniel Brühl) checks in on Bucky (Sebastian Sam), Sam (Anthony Mackie), and Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier Season 1 Episode 3 “Power Broker” (2021), Marvel Entertainment
Despite the drastic differences in membership and mission between the original comic book and Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnations of the team, Thunderbolts co-writer Eric Pearson has revealed that he briefly flirted with the idea of not only reintroducing audiences to Baron Zemo, but also having him serve as the mastermind behind the entire New Avengers operation.
[SPOILER WARNING: Significant spoilers for Marvel’s Thunderbolts follow below. If you’d like to avoid them, please refrain from reading any further.]
The Thunderbolts make their public debut in Thunderbolts Vol. 1 #1 “Justice… Like Lightning!” (1997), Marvel Comics. Words by Kurt Busiek, art by Mark Bagley, Vince Russell, Joe Rosas, Dave Lanphear, and Oscar Gongorra.
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Unlike such in-universe counterparts as the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and even the Defenders (for all their murky canon status), the idea of bringing the Thunderbolts together is one that could be best described as ‘absolutely unhinged’.
After all, not only is its roster composed of multiple ‘lone wolves’ whose only common traits are their histories of bloodshed and mental health struggles, but the team’s initial raison d’être is nothing more than respective self-preservation, with each member putting aside their differences in order to escape from Valentina Allera de Fontaine’s attempt to cover up her own tracks and burn them alive.
The team realizes that they are the only thing standing between Earth and The Void (Lewis Pullman) in Thunderbolts (2025), Marvel Entertainment
In fact, their name isn’t even an official moniker, government-appointed or otherwise, but rather a mocking reference to an anecdote shared by Yelena Belenova, the White Widow, regarding her past on the West Chesapeake Valley Thunderbolts children’s soccer team.
But after bonding over their past traumas and a desire for revenge against de Fontaine, the group, against all odds, eventually finds their cooperative groove, in doing so uniting together to help the Sentry regain control of the Void and thus save the world from disappearing into a literal black pit of despair.
Unfortunately for the team, their new harmony is short-lived, as immediately after bringing the Sentry back from the brink, the Thunderbolts are ambushed by de Fontaine, who uses their victory as a PR opportunity to both take credit for their formation and introduce them to the world as the New Avengers.
Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) testifies before Congress in Thunderbolts (2025), Marvel Entertainment
Yet, for as enjoyable as many have found the film, its events still differ significantly from its source material.
As detailed in the team’s debut run by writer Kurt Busiek and artist Mark Bagley, the Thunderbolts originally presented themselves as a brand-new alliance of freshly costumed heroes, their only motivations being to protect the people of New York City following the sudden disappearances of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four following the then-recent defeat of Onslaught.
However, it is soon revealed that rather than heroes – or ‘anti-heroes who have made some bad decisions in life’ like their cinematic counterparts – the team’s roster is actually composed of rebranded super villains, as led by none other than the notorious Baron Zemo, who are seeking to gain the public’s trust as crime-fighters before ultimately breaking character and taking over the world.
And while Zemo eventually does try to through with this plan, he is ultimately thwarted by his fellow Thunderbolts, all of whom rebel against him after realizing that the heroic life is far more fulfilling (and filled with far fewer broken bones) than the criminal one.
Baron Zemo reveals the true identities of his new team in Thunderbolts Vol. 1 #1 “Justice… Like Lightning!” (1997), Marvel Comics. Words by Kurt Busiek, art by Mark Bagley, Vince Russell, Joe Rosas, Dave Lanphear, and Oscar Gongorra.
To this end, while the cinematic Thunderbolts share little relation to the original outside of their roster being less-than-heroic (or any of their other iterations, such as Red Hulk’s black-ops team or Norman Osborn’s pro-registration hit squad), the aforementioned Pearson admits that, at one point, he entertained the possibility of having Baron Zemo, as portrayed by Daniel Brühl, being the actual mastermind behind the team’s formation.
Speaking to IGN’s Scott Collura on the topic of attempting to film a post-credit sequence amidst Marvel Studios’ recent casting and scheduling turmoils, Pearson, who co-wrote the film with The Bear co-showrunner Joanna Calo, recalled that the tease went through a number of different iterations before landing on the Fantastic Four-centric one that audiences ultimately recieved.
“So I was throwing together at the beginning a post-credit sequence that had to deal with Kang,” said the writer, whose past Marvel Studios writing credits include the first four Marvel One-Shots and Thor: Ragnarok. “[Another idea] had to deal with more of a direct relation to the fact that Valentina sent Yelenaafter Clint Barton, after Hawkeye, [for] the Hawkeye show.”
“But as time passes,” he lamented, “you’re like, well, is anyone going to make that connection still to the thing that they haven’t seen in two or three years?”
Yelena (Florence Pugh) vents her anger against Clint (Jeremy Renner) in Hawkeye Episode 6 “So This Is Christmas?” (2021), Marvel Entertainment
To this end, Pearson explained that while he and Calo were aware of the team’s various Marvel Comics iterations and did take them into consideration while writing the script, they ultimately found that none of their story elements would work with the plans they had for the film.
“We wanted to do something different than ‘authority figure forces criminals to work together,’” he said, ostensibly referring to DC’s Suicide Squad franchise. “And once you take that out, the people from the comics who have put them together [the team] in the past, the Baron Zemos, the Thunderbolt Rosses, they don’t fit the narrative in the same way. So while we’re very aware and we talked about these ideas and, hey, if there was ever a way to include them, it’s great because it makes sense and it honors the comics. But we also didn’t want to break our story that we were excited about just to do fan service.”
Zemo (Daniel Brühl) takes aim at a group of Flagsmashers in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier Season 1 Episode 3 “Power Broker” (2021), Marvel Entertainment
On this note of former Thunderbolts leaders, Pearson closed out his time with Collura by noting that while Ross, as recently portrayed by Harrison Ford in Captain America: Brave New World, was never genuinely considered for a cameo, Zemo made it at least made it into one of the script’s drafts.
“There was definitely a [post-credits] tag that I did a million years ago where Zemo is like Keyser Söze [in The Usual Suspects],” the writer told IGN. “Like he’s been pulling the strings from prison in some way. But I don’t think that iteration lived longer than like, ‘Hey, what about this?’ ‘Nope, not that.’”
The Thunderbolts make their public debut in Thunderbolts Vol. 1 #10 “Heroes Reward” (1997), Marvel Comics. Words by Kurt Busiek, art by Mark Bagley, Vince Russell, Joe Rosas, and Dave Lanphear.
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Eric Pearson says that he once considered taking after Marvel Comics and having Baron Zemo play a major role in ‘Thunderbolts’. Read More