One of the biggest mysteries surrounding Marvel’s Thunderbolts* is the asterisk in the title. Head honcho Kevin Feige promised way back when they first unveiled the confusing punctuation mark that all would be revealed when the movie hits theaters, and only then. Well, guess what? Thunderbolts* is now in theaters, and I’m here to tell you that they absolutely fumble the asterisk reveal in the most bizarre way possible.
Just to get this out of the way, because I’m sure at least 99% of you are reading this to find out “why is there an asterisk in Thunderbolts*” or some variation thereof, versus my expert analysis on punctuation marks — and spoilers past this point — it’s New Avengers. At the end of the movie, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has managed to salvage her disaster creation of The Sentry (Lewis Pullman) by tricking the Thunderbolts team into getting introduced as her new team of Avengers. She even specifically says “New Avengers” when she’s presenting them to the assembled press. Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) tells Valentina they own her now, does her best impression of the “girl who is going to be okay” meme, and that’s the technical end of the movie… Other than the two end credits scenes.
But you’re not here for any of that. In the end credits, we see the title Thunderbolts*, asterisk at all. And then there’s a sort of page-ripping effect, and we see the logo for New Avengers. That’s all well and good, but… What does that have to do with the asterisk?
The issue is, and I know I’m getting very quibbling here, but whatever, there’s no reciprocal asterisk on “New Avengers.” If the title of the movie had been Thunderbolts without the asterisk, and then the page rip, and then the New Avengers title… Fine. But there’s no real connection between the full title of the movie as released and what’s revealed at the end. They are grammatically unconnected.
Not to plus up the end credits, but alternately if they had revealed the title Thunderbolts, then popped up an asterisk, and then at the bottom of the screen, also with an asterisk, “*New Avengers”… Well, that’s frankly, much funnier and much more in line with the tone of the movie. Instead, what we get is a setup to a joke with no punchline.
There’s another option that would have been thematically tied into the movie and made the asterisk make more sense. As you jocks probably know, an asterisk is often used to denote a a record that has some sort of qualification, or worse something marring the record. In the movie, the team calls themselves Thunderbolts after Yelena’s pee-wee soccer team, which never won a game. A large portion of the movie is spent talking about how all of them, to crib a phrase from another MCU movie, have red in their ledger. They’re all losers. They’re all not right for the job. By the end of the movie they’ve “beaten” the villain The Void by convincing Bob (Pullman) not to fight him, and they haven’t beaten the real villain, Valentina, at all. They are the Thunderbolts, and there absolutely should be an asterisk next to their name because they are only partially qualified to be a team.
That, however, is not brought up or discussed at any point in the movie. So devoid of that implied context, the asterisk is merely a part of the title thrown in there to indicate this is really a movie titled New Avengers. Except, as previously noted, they don’t bother to visually connect Thunderbolts* with New Avengers in the end credits. Therefore, they are just two different titles for the movie.
It’s a bizarre omission that could have been easily fixed. Instead, the inclusion of the character at the end of the title is just an asterisk on film history.
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