The Thunderbolts are the MCU’s answer to the Suicide Squad

polygon.com:

Every superhero universe needs a fractious team of supervillains pretending to do good things because someone is making them or paying them to, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe finally has enough living supervillains to make its own: Thunderbolts is coming to theaters in July 2024.

The big Marvel news out of Disney’s 2022 D23 Expo was reveal of just which bad guys would make up the Thunderbolts movie lineup. So let’s dig into who the Thunderbolts are, and what fans can expect from Marvel’s take on a Suicide Squad.

There have been many, many different incarnations of the Thunderbolts in Marvel Comics canon — but the team started as a bait and switch. Writer Kurt Busiek and artist Mark Bagley created them for The Incredible Hulk in 1997 (a whole decade after the modern incarnation of the Suicide Squad, so don’t get it twisted), as a new superhero team attempting to fill the hole left by the Avengers’ absence.

Where were the Avengers at the time? Well, an evil psychic being born from Professor X’s suppressed thoughts of — you know what? Don’t worry about it.

The twist was that the Thunderbolts were actually the Masters of Evil in disguise, trying to flimflam their way to power and fame by pretending to be superheroes, under the hidden leadership of a second-generation Nazi: Baron Helmut Zemo. Eventually the “heroes” of the group kicked Zemo out of it and tried going straight for a while before their story petered out — but the idea of a superhero team made of supervillains is just too good a toy to leave in the proverbial toybox.

Sometimes, the Thunderbolts are working to redeem themselves, and sometimes they’re just working for corrupt government leaders. Some members have even been heroes — usually the ones with bad