The first trailer for Marvel Studios’ new supervillain movie has been released — and Utah is a supporting player.
“Thunderbolts*” is slated for release on May 2, 2025. It centers on several of the bad guys from past Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, summoned by the conniving Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) to form a team doing off-the-books missions for the government.
One action sequence featured in the three-minute trailer — an extended car chase where armored vehicles and a limousine get upended and flipped over — was shot in Utah, a spokesperson for the Utah Film Commission confirmed Monday.
Director Jake Schreier and the crew filmed the car sequence in and around Emery and Grand counties in the summer of 2023, the spokesperson said — adding that the production spent about $7.9 million in Utah during the shoot.
The film commission announced the Marvel production in June 2023, though the studio kept the name “Thunderbolts” a secret. The working title was “Oops All Berries,” a reference to a brand of Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereal that has no Cap’n Crunch pieces and only berry-flavored pieces — an allusion to the movie’s all-villains, no-superheroes storyline.
At the time, the film commission quoted Brian Chapek, one of the film’s executive producers, who said the production “looked at many options and found that Utah featured such a unique and impressive geography that we hadn’t seen before in a movie. The Utah locations we scouted felt untouched by the larger world, which made us very excited to shoot there.”
“Thunderbolts*” — there’s no explanation yet for the asterisk — has been compared to DC Comics’ “Suicide Squad” movies, which also collected various bad guys, notably Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, for secret missions.
Three of the Marvel villains — Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Alexei Shostakov aka Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Antonia Dreykov aka Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) — were introduced in 2021′s “Black Widow.” Ava Starr aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) was seen in “Ant-Man and the Wasp” in 2018. John Walker aka US Agent (Wyatt Russell), a fill-in Captain America who went rogue, made his debut in the 2021 Disney+ series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” And the Winter Soldier himself, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), has appeared previously in seven Marvel movies, starting with 2011′s “Captain America: The First Avenger.”
