Sebastian Stan says Thunderbolts is Marvel’s Breakfast Club

By Alex Welch Published January 13, 2025

Marvel Studios may have released only one film last year, but it has three theatrical titles coming in 2025. The movies in question — February’s Captain America: Brave New World, May’s Thunderbolts*, and July’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps — all promise to move the Marvel Cinematic Universe‘s Multiverse Saga forward in their own unique ways. The three also seem very different from each other. Brave New World, for instance, is being marketed as a paranoid political thriller, while Fantastic Four has seemingly adopted a retro-futuristic, ’60s-inspired aesthetic.

As for Thunderbolts*, one of the film’s stars says that it has more in common with a classic 1980s coming-of-age dramedy than comic book fans may expect. “Thunderbolts* is really interesting because it was so fun, man,” Sebastian Stan, who is set to make his MCU return as Bucky Barnes in the forthcoming film, revealed during his recent appearance on Variety’s Awards Circuit Podcast. “I’m curious to see how people are going to respond [to it] because the closest [film] that comes [to mind] is that movie The Breakfast Club.”

“It’s really that. It’s an odd group thrown together, and the humor is in there, the tone is in there. They’re all misfits,” Stan continued. “I’m excited about it.”

Stan’s comments may come as a surprise. However, Thunderbolts* really is primed to bring together an unlikely assortment of existing MCU characters, including Stan’s Bucky, Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, David Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov, Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster, Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, among others.

Whether or not Thunderbolts* will be able to forge a cohesive group out of its misfit protagonists as well as The Breakfast Club does with its teenaged characters remains to be seen. Thanks to its idiosyncratic trailers, cast, and Stan’s recent comments, though, it’s clear now that the film, at the very least, is striving to be more interesting than its straightforward team-up story suggests on paper.

Thunderbolts* is set to hit theaters on May 2.