Looking for your purpose in life? Be careful who you assemble.

In the new teaser trailer for Marvel Studio’s Thunderbolts, a collection of some of the most accomplished supervillains in the worlds are lashed together into a team to run missions for the government.

In the modern era, teasers and trailers tend to give away major chunks of the plot of the film. Not this time. The characters are established, the premise is set up, and we do not have a single shred of the plot to spoil things.

Here’s what we do know.

The film is directed by Jake Schreir (Robot and Frank, 2012), executive produced by Brian Chapek (Black Widow) and Matthew Jenkins (Murder on the Orient Express, 2017) , produced by Kevin Feige, and written by Joanna Calo (The Bear 2022) and Lee Sung Jin, with additional writing credits for Kurt Busiek as the creator of the comic book series, and Eric Pearson for some of the story elements.

The cast includes Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, Lewis Pullman as Robert Reynolds / Sentry, Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes, Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster, Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost, David Harbour as the Red Guardian, Wyatt Russel as John Walker / U.S. Agent, and Julia Louis Dreyfus as Valentia Allegra de Fontaine.

This is one of those “the other shoe drops” moments. They’ve been building up to this film for a while now. De Fontaine has been covertly assembling this group of castoffs and misfits over the past few years, as seen in Marvel Cinematic Universe fare like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Black Widow. Now she’s getting the whole gang together to handle the worst kind of bad guy there is. 

The film looks like it’s big on action, big on the reliable Marvel humor, big on characterization. It somehow feels like a smaller film than, say, The Avengers or Iron Man.

Not everybody gets to be the shining heroes from the temple on the mountain. Come on, Thunderbolts*. Bring it. Let’s see what you can do.

Thunderbolts* from Marvel Studios hits the theaters on May 2, 2025.