Which Thunderbolts Character Are You?

Learn More About Thunderbolts

Marvel spent most of the early 2020s being told it had a formula problem, and Thunderbolts* was the studio's most direct answer to that criticism. Released in May 2025 and directed by Jake Schreier, it took a handful of characters the franchise had left scattered across a decade of films and television and put them in a movie that is, underneath the fight choreography, about depression. The asterisk in the title is a joke that pays off, and the film was widely received as the most emotionally coherent thing Marvel had produced in years.

Florence Pugh anchors it as Yelena Belova, and the film belongs to her more completely than the ensemble framing suggests. Yelena arrived in Black Widow as a scene-stealer and has been the most reliably watchable presence in the franchise since. Here she is given the opening the character always deserved: lethal, funny, and profoundly lonely, running on competence because stillness genuinely frightens her. The movie is honest enough to show that being extremely good at your job is not the same as having a life.

Sebastian Stan returns as Bucky Barnes, now further from the Winter Soldier than he has ever been and still not certain the distance is real. David Harbour plays Alexei Shostakov, the Red Guardian, all bravado and heartbreak, nostalgic for a version of himself that may never have existed. Wyatt Russell's John Walker is the film's most uncomfortable inclusion, a man who wanted the job, did the job and broke something, and who is painfully aware of how he is perceived. Hannah John-Kamen and Olga Kurylenko fill out the roster.

The film's real gamble is Lewis Pullman as Bob, a soft-spoken man carrying something enormous. Without spoiling the mechanics, Bob is the vehicle for the movie's central idea, which is that the most dangerous force in the story is not a conqueror or a cosmic entity but a person's own despair. The climax resolves through presence rather than violence, and it lands because the film spent ninety minutes earning it.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is finally given room as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, the fixer who has been assembling this group across post-credits scenes since The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. She plays Val as someone genuinely delighted by her own amorality, and the film is smart enough to let her be funny without pretending she is harmless.

Critically, Thunderbolts* was received as a course correction, praised for its restraint, its willingness to sit in silence and its refusal to end on a portal in the sky. It performed solidly rather than spectacularly at the box office, which prompted a fair amount of commentary about whether audience fatigue had outpaced the studio's ability to fix the problem. The team's status at the end of the film reframes them for whatever comes next in the wider franchise.

If you want more of this corner of the universe, try our Peacemaker quiz, which covers the other side of the aisle, or our Alien: Earth quiz for another recent genre ensemble built on people who should not be trusted with power.

So which Thunderbolt are you? The one who fills every silence with work, the one still proving he chose this, the one performing a legend he never was, the one holding something enormous, or the one who wanted it and got it? Take the quiz above and find out.