Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova teams up with David Harbour’s Red Guardian and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes to fight an unknown adversary in the recently dropped trailer of Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts*, which promises a new band of Avengers-like superheroes minus the moral obligation.

Dropped by Marvel Entertainment on Monday, the three-minute-24-second-long trailer also alludes to moments from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which starred Stan as the ruthless mercenary The Winter Soldier.

The trailer begins with Pugh’s Yelena arriving at the doorstep of her father, Alexei Shostakov (Red Guardian), played by David Harbour. After finding her father living in a squalid house, Yelena opens up about feeling empty and unfulfilled in her life. A news report featuring John Walker (Wyatt Russell), which Yelena can be seen reading in the trailer, suggests that the film is set sometime after the events of 2021’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

While Red Guardian and John Walker both share the same fate and cage themselves up in their homes, Yelena still carries out missions as a spy for underground organisations to fill the void in her heart. On one of her missions, the three of them show up at a building where other supervillains like Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) also appear.

The supervillains come across a man named Bob (Lewis Pullman) who appears as ordinary but clearly isn’t. However, when all the doors and windows of the building suddenly get shut down, they realise that they have been lured into a trap by an unseen adversary with a vendetta against each of them.

The Thunderbolts is a Marvel Comics series that debuted in 1997. The initial premise of the series revolves around a group of superheroes seemingly emerging to fill the void left by the Avengers, who were believed to be dead after a massive battle. However, as the series progresses, it is revealed that the Thunderbolts are actually a team of villains in disguise, led by Baron Zemo, a classic Captain America villain.

Harrison Ford and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are set to return as Thaddeus 'Thunderbolt' Ross and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, respectively. Top Gun: Maverick star Lewis Pullman is going to debut as The Sentry in the new MCU movie.

Directed by Jake Schreier and produced by Kevin Feige, Thunderbolts* is slated to hit theatres in May 2025.