It’s worth remembering that in the pages of Marvel Comics, Thunderbolt Ross isn’t responsible for bringing the Thunderbolts team together. He only takes over the team after it has already been established. Rather, that honor — or dishonor — goes to Baron Helmut Zemo, who creates it to seemingly step in for the Avengers, only for it to be revealed that he and his villainous cohorts have no desire to be heroes. Over the years, the team goes through numerous membership changes and leaders, with the Green Goblin, Hawkeye, and Luke Cage spearheading the operation over time.
At the time of this writing, it doesn’t appear that the MCU’s Zemo (Daniel Brühl) will have anything to do with the Thunderbolts’ founding, which is a pretty big change from the source material. The other major change is the on-screen lineup, consisting of Yelena Belova, Bucky Barnes, Red Guardian, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell). In the comics, all of these names join the Thunderbolts roster at one point or another, but they’re never all on the team at the same time. In this way, the MCU’s Thunderbolts appear to be an amalgamation of multiple comic incarnations.
It’ll be interesting to see just how different of a direction “Thunderbolts” takes with the team and if there’s any overlap with the source material when the film premieres on May 2, 2025.
