How the Thunderbolts* End-Credits Scenes Set Up The Fantastic Four: First Steps
How the end-credits scene for Thunderbolts sets the New Avengers on a collision course with the Fantastic Four
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Thunderbolts*.
By the end of Thunderbolts* the rag-tag group of sidekicks and antiheroes has emerged as the collective savior of New York. A supersoldier serum test subject named Bob (Lewis Pullman) tries to become the superhero Sentry but loses control of his powers and becomes the villainous Void. Void captures innocent bystanders and traps them inside their worst memories. Florence Pugh’s Yelena leads the effort to help Bob defeat his dark side and release the citizens of New York from the Void’s clutches. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Julia Louis-Dreyfus‘ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who greenlit the experimentation on Bob in the first place, tries to salvage her reputation by rebranding the Thunderbolts—which includes Yelena and Bob along with Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost—as the New Avengers.
In two end-credits scenes, the New Avengers try to prove they’re a worthy replacement for the (admittedly much more powerful) team from which they’ve adopted their name. And they examine some satellite images that suggest the Fantastic Four are about to crash-land on their planet.
Read more: Everything to Remember About All the Members of the Thunderbolts* Team
What happens in the mid-credits scene for Thunderbolts*
Red Guardian finally sees his dream of gracing the front of a Wheaties box comes true. Inside a grocery store, he tries to sell a random shopper on a cereal box with the “New Avengers” plastered across it. He even smiles next to the box in hopes that he’ll be recognized as one of the team members. The poor woman just trying to buy her groceries smiles and slips away.
Read more: All the Future MCU Movies Announced in Marvel’s Major Revamp
What happens in the end-credits scene for Thunderbolts*
Fourteen months after the events of Thunderbolts*, the New Avengers are camped out in the old Avengers tower in New York City. They discuss their recent legal woes—apparently Sam Wilson, a.k.a. Captain America, is suing them over copyright infringement for use of the Avengers name. Bucky tried to talk Sam out of the suit, to no avail. Red Guardian suggests they adopt the name “New Avengerz” with a “z” and even sports a jacket with the new logo and several sponsorship patches sewn on it.
The team bemoans the fact that the media doesn’t take them seriously and mentions that there is some “space crisis” taking place but that the government isn’t filling them in on the details. In fairness, the team would have no way to get to space given that the only team member who can fly—Bob—still doesn’t have control of his powers. He is scared to exercise his abilities as superhero Sentry lest he unleash his villainous alter-ego, the Void.
The team gets an alert that an “extra-dimensional ship” is entering Earth’s orbit. Yelena calls up satellite photos and zooms in on the ship. It has the Fantastic Four logo on it.
Why the Fantastic Four may be coming to the New Avengers’ universe
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the next movie on Marvel Studios’ slate and is set to premiere July 25. The creative team behind that project has revealed that the Fantastic Four heroes—Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and Thing—exist in a parallel universe to the one where the Avengers movies and Thunderbolts* take place.
Hopping across parallel universes isn’t new to the MCU: Various Spider-Men and Spider-Man villains did in in Spider-Man: No Way Home and so did Doctor Strange in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. But why would the Fantastic Four team need to come to the Avengers’ universe?
Trailers for the upcoming film feature a villain named the Silver Surfer arriving on earth to warn the Fantastic Four of a cataclysmic event that will destroy their planet. Perhaps the super-team fails to stop the destruction of their Earth and must flee to a parallel timeline. Or maybe they succeed but feel they need to travel to a parallel universe to warn other heroes of some other threat.
In all likelihood, we’ll see the Fantastic Four meet Yelena and our other heroes either at the end of their movie or at the beginning of the next Avengers film, Avengers: Doomsday. That movie stars Robert Downey Jr. not as Iron Man (the role he made famous) but Dr. Doom, the longtime Fantastic Four antagonist. And we know from the cast list announcement that both the New Avengers and members of the original Avengers like Chris Hemsworth’s Thor will team up in that movie. Several of the original X-Men, like Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and James Marsden’s Cyclops, will also appear in the film, which suggests that yet another parallel universe will collide with the main Avengers timeline.
