The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: Why the Thunderbolts didn’t happen

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

SPOILERS for The Falcon and the Winter Solider. With The Falcon and the Winter Solider now behind us, we now know which fan theories have panned out and which haven't, and one of the biggest theories that didn't come to fruition involved the Thunderbolts, a super-team formed by Baron Zemo which consisted of reformed supervillains.

With the arrival of Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her recruitment of John Walker (Wyatt Russell) as U.S. Agent, not to mention Baron Zemo (Daniel Brühl) being captured and sent to The Raft, it was thought that we might just be seeing the origins of the Thunderbolts, but Marvel executive producer Nate Moore told Entertainment Weekly that the Thunderbolts were never in the cards.

The honest truth is, no. Not because we don't think they're cool because they are, but because we already felt like there was so much on the table in this series that we didn't also then want to introduce a group of characters, or reintroduce people that we've seen in the past, and cloud the story.

"The more characters you produce, then you have to service them," Moore continued. "And then we wouldn't have had time to maybe go home with Sam and Bucky to Louisiana, or do some of those things. That, on a character level, got us interested in doing this [show] in the first place." That's not to say that the Thunderbolts won't happen somewhere down the road however, especially as Marvel clearly has plans for these character in future movies and/or Disney+ series. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier showrunner Malcolm Spellman said, "I don't know. I just know there seems to be a lot of chatter around that. I don't know if fans are crazy or not."