? There’s no denying that the MCU has been in rough shape since Avengers Endgame, with few exceptions like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine letting longtime fans cling on to hope. Thunderbolts doesn’t quite restore Marvel to its former glory, but it offers something arguably more valuable — a course correction that prioritizes character over spectacle.

Suicide Squad if it was good: Russian assassin Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) of Black Widow fame, is burnt out and emotionally hollow in Director Jake Schreier’s Thunderbolts. She finds herself reluctantly teaming up with a collection of Marvel’s misfits after they discover that their handler, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) — who was peppered throughout the MCU, but featured most notably in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — has marked them for elimination. The resulting adventure is refreshingly scaled-down and character-focused — less about saving the universe and more about saving themselves.

The assembled team represents Marvel’s curious new strategy of building a marquee film around secondary characters from previous entries. The most recognizable faces are Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) and Red Guardian (David Harbour), and are joined by disgraced Captain America replacement John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and the mysterious Bob (Lewis Pullman). These aren’t gods or bn’aire geniuses — they’re downtrodden people who, as Yelena describes them, mostly just “punch and shoot.”

What distinguishes Thunderbolts from Marvel’s many secondary-character productions is that the characters know they’re not A-listers. The film has a scrappy, down-to-earth energy that serves both as its narrative engine and its meta-commentary. The B-team know they’ve made mistakes, failed spectacularly, and they live with crushing guilt. The script by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo mines this territory for both humor and surprising emotional depth.

But the Marvel curse is inescapable. After methodically building character dynamics and establishing a grounded tone, Thunderbolts shifts into a more conventional MCU finale involving Void, a superpowered entity whose abilities are allegedly stronger than “all the Avengers rolled into one.” While Schreier attempts something visually inventive — staging the confrontation in surreal psychological landscapes he refers to as “interconnected shame rooms” — the resolution feels rushed and disappointingly neat given the psychological complexity that preceded it.

Thunderbolts isn’t perfect, but it suggests a promising path forward by the MCU — for a franchise at risk of collapsing under its own narrative weight, sometimes what’s needed isn’t another world-ending threat, but the simple pleasure of watching compelling characters. In that sense, Thunderbolts isn’t just a solid entry in the MCU canon — it’s a template for how Marvel could (and should) sustainably move forward. Don’t believe us? At the movie premier, the cast tore back the Thunderbolts poster to reveal the movie’s true name: The New Avengers.

WHERE TO WATCH IT- Thunderbolts is screening in VOX Cinemas at City Center Almaza and Mall of Egypt, Scene Cinemas at District 5 and Cairo Festival City, Citystars Cinemas, and Cima Arkan. You can watch the trailer on YouTube (runtime: 3:24).

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