Next year’s apparent climax to Marvel’s ‘Phase Five’ features an Avengers B-team with the little-remembered Bucky Barnes and Ghost among the sidekicks and also-rans

The trouble with Thunderbolts* is that this is a superhero team made up almost entirely of all those Marvel characters you had completely forgotten existed. Not the cool ones who get their own Funko Pops. We’re talking about the B-team – the backup Avengers. The ones who showed up to the superhero cookout but left before anyone got to taste the chimichangas.

It’s not that Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova and David Harbour’s Red Guardian are boring, per se. Their spiky father-daughter banter was the highlight of 2021’s Black Widow (because, let’s be honest, it certainly wasn’t Ray Winstone’s Russian accent, which took more detours than a lost tourist on the Moscow metro). But if they had never turned up again in a Marvel movie – and that would have been a pity – it’s quite possible nobody would have ever noticed.