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‘Thunderbolts’: Steven Yeun Joins Marvel Studios Pic In Key Role - Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: Following his Oscar-nominated role in Minari and scene-stealing part in Nope, Steven Yeun is continuing to show his range as he is now looking to add a Marvel movie to his resume. Sources tell Deadline, Yeun is set to join Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts, in a part that is not only significant to this film but could also play a role going forward in future films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Meanwhile, although I haven't seen it from a site or other source I'd consider reputable just yet, it sounds like the Agatha show has been mothballed more or less indefinitely.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Meanwhile, although I haven't seen it from a site or other source I'd consider reputable just yet, it sounds like the Agatha show has been mothballed more or less indefinitely.

That seems incredibly unlikely. It's already in production with set photos and everything. I also suspect it's story is pretty key to set up several characters needed for other projects. Stuff I have seen is it could be delayed till next year. Which would make sense with them stretching out their production schedules to give more time for post production and special effects.

From what I hear all the D+ shows are facing cuts to their budgets. Would not surprise me to see a bunch get cut completely.

CBR have picked it up also, which is a tad more reputable, although not one I'd consider cast iron.

Seems it's less the production is under threat so much as it's been taken off the release schedule completely for the time being.

Given that, I suspect, a few of these shows were added as reactionary additions to the schedule (Agatha, Echo) than things Feige would have more carefully planned, it's unsurprising that they're the ones having the most issues.

We're seeing the normalisation of Marvel Studios now that Chapek and the bankers he put over Feige are gone. Now that Kevin has the reins back, so to speak, the output will slow and (hopefully) the quality can improve.

I am still grinding through the second season of Agent Carter. It is not nearly as good as Season 1, and there is a forced Tie-in with Agents of Shield that was going on around the same time. I think that is hurting the overall story, however the characters are still fun to follow.

I imagine this got nuked when Marvel TV got nuked too. However, thanks to the time period, costuming, and sets it was probably not cheap to make anyway.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Given that, I suspect, a few of these shows were added as reactionary additions to the schedule (Agatha, Echo) than things Feige would have more carefully planned, it's unsurprising that they're the ones having the most issues.

We're seeing the normalisation of Marvel Studios now that Chapek and the bankers he put over Feige are gone. Now that Kevin has the reins back, so to speak, the output will slow and (hopefully) the quality can improve.

Do we know what exactly happened on the business end? I had no idea Kevin had lost any control over the MCU after Endgame, though it definitely explains how wonky phase 4 was. Did they just put new executives in charge over him?

As I understand it, and I may be completely wrong, they wanted to use the MCU and SW to drive subscriptions to D+, so both had to start coming up with TV series they otherwise wouldn't have done.

With D+ not being as profitable as hoped they are pulling back on the productions.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Given that, I suspect, a few of these shows were added as reactionary additions to the schedule (Agatha, Echo) than things Feige would have more carefully planned, it's unsurprising that they're the ones having the most issues.

We're seeing the normalisation of Marvel Studios now that Chapek and the bankers he put over Feige are gone. Now that Kevin has the reins back, so to speak, the output will slow and (hopefully) the quality can improve.

Do we know what exactly happened on the business end? I had no idea Kevin had lost any control over the MCU after Endgame, though it definitely explains how wonky phase 4 was. Did they just put new executives in charge over him?

Bob Chapek (spelling?) was CEO after Bob Iger "retired". Iger was the guy who protected Feige from Ike Perlmutter and put the MCU under feiges control instead of the Marvel Council.

Chapek apparently dove all in on Disney + as his landmark move and is likely responsible for the vastly increased amount of output from Marvel Studios. (There are more hours of content in phase 4 than phase 1-3 combined) and contributed heavily to the tapping out the CGI studio production capacity.

Capek was removed and Iger has taken back over. Followed with these announcements of things slowing down again.

Fascinating! Thanks for explaining the situation fellas.

Chapek's right hand man was a guy called Kareem Daniel. Chapek reorganised Disney's entertainment division, lumping a lot of things together and putting them all under the command of Daniel. This meant that Daniel was placed in a position between Chapek and Feige, meaning Feige had to go through him (whereas before Feige went straight to Iger, or Alan Horn when Horn was still around - and Horn is an industry veteran known all across Hollywood; he's who WB CEO David Zaslav brought in to help out when he took over WB). Between Chapek and Daniel there was an air of "quantity over quality", as they wanted to use their big brands (SW, Disney and Pixar) to drive D+ subscriptions.

If you know anything about how badly this went for WB with their "Year of Stupid", then you should be able to guess how well this approach went for Disney. They put out big Pixar films onto D+ (Pixar employees were not happy about this), and pushed more and more D+ shows. The malaise of Phase 4 is partly because of the people above Kevin.

Now yes, the pandemic is part of this - that's unavoidable - but remember that the various high ups went to the board to oust Chapek not because of bad financial results from COVID, but because they couldn't stand the way Chapek was running the company. Daniel went very soon after Chapek got the boot, and suddenly Feige was reporting to Iger again, the thing he used to do when Marvel was truly dominating.

So I went to Disney+ and decided I just don't give a crap about the Bad Batch anymore.

So instead, I watched Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur cause the art looked neat.

Not bad. Does the motion-comic thing at times, which I think is a purposeful design choice? Might break the show for some people.

Solid 8/10. Fun show.

This is from a different forum and was specifically from an Ant-Man & The Wasp Quantumania thread and their recent terrible second weekend results, but I feel like is more valid in a general Marvel thread so I wanted to repost it here:

Multiple factors [when it comes to Ant-Man 3's massive second week drop] to be honest. February is just a bad month for movies, early reception and word of mouth hurting the movie, and to be honest Ant-Man is just a weird movie to kick off the next phase.

A near 70% drop is terrible. When it happens to movies like No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness it makes more sense as those have huge opening weekends, and the second weekend simply can't live up to that. Ant-Man 3 did not have that level of opening, yet still saw a massive drop off.

See when that clickbait headline came out the other day that kept adding on conditions to narrow its focus and basically make itself meaningless ("Biggest drop... for a movie that made $100m on opening... on a Tuesday... during a full moon... during Summer... during a Year of the Rabbit... with a guy named Chris on the catering team...") I dismissed it as it was just some junk website chasing clicks. The actual weekend results weren't out yet.

But they're out now, and they're bad. You can say it's February all you like, or that there are "multiple" factors, but the simple fact is that this movie is doing badly. You get a 45%-50% drop, and you're cheering. You get a 50-60% drop, and ok, that's what you expected. A 65% drop is a bit harrowing. But a 70% drop? That's "high level meetings at Marvel HQ" levels of bad.

I don't believe in "superhero fatigue", but one thing I did hear today was the idea of "mediocrity fatigue". The MCU hasn't been exceptional in a while. I think Phase 4 drained people's interest not because of a lack of interest in superheroes, but because of a lack of interest in meandering aimless plotting with movies that didn't seem to be for anyone (like seriously, what was Eternals?). And the D+ shows aren't hitting either. Their quality ranges so much from flat out excellent (most of Wandavision, Loki), to exceptionally bad (She-Hulk) to just kinda there (Hawkeye). And it's the "just kinda there" ones that are the real problem. The things that aren't good, but at the same time aren't so bad as to garner attention. Phase 4 has just kinda been "there" for most of its run.

And we're seeing this in Ant-Man 3's results. This isn't the worst movie of the MCU - not by a long shot - but it's getting worse results than things like Black Widow or Dumb & Dumber not because it is worse than them, but because people are taking their feelings of frustration and malaise out on this film. It's not fair. It doesn't deserve it. But it's what the film is stuck with.

This is going to be a wakeup call at Marvel, that's for sure, and I hope that what we're seeing is just the lag time between previous productions and what Marvel is doing today to fix this, because if they don't, there won't be a Phase 7.

If I were to put a finger on it, it's definitely not super hero fatigue so much as 'global ever rising stakes fatigue.' The Godzilla threshold keeps going up and it's not just limiting the stories they can tell but sucking a lot of the individual character out of those stories as they all become more or less the same. And to top it off many of the characters the MCU was built on aren't there anymore. No more Cap or Tony, Banner seems gone. Widow is gone.

Of the new characters who emerged to take their place, Strange is simply too much of a jerk with too little heart of gold and I couldn't even tell you what other heroes we're supposed to really root for as the 'hearts' of the franchise.

There's really just Tom Holland who I like but is too young to really carry that weight as a character.

Chadwick Boseman was the guy who could have taken that role but fate is a cruel mistress. In his absence there's too much disconnection and meandering indeed to hold my interest. There's no character really bringing all these other characters together.

I think the fatigue is real. And it's not just the quantity/quality, but the lack of cohesion both internally as well as with the source material.

I haven't seen Black Widow or Eternals yet. I have no desire to do so. Release a Black Widow movie after she's dead and then do what they did to Taskmaster? Why should I care about this movie? Why should I care about Eternals at all? The end of Eternals has a pretty big thing happen, then 5 movies and 4 tv shows later NO ONE HAS MENTIONED IT.

Ant-Man 3 kind of flies in the face of the end of Ant-Man 2, which we could hand-wave away if the end of Ant-Man 2 wasn't extremely crucial to the end of the Infinity Saga. Janet helps get Scott to the quantum realm at the end of that movie. Endgame is entirely dependent on that happening. And on top of that they Taskmastered MODOK in the process.

Doctor Strange 2 is wholly dependent on the events of Wandavision. While I liked a lot of Wandavision, leaving us with the realization that Wanda subconsciously enslaved and tortured a whole town is an unsatisfying ending to a character we were supposed to have cared about and they reinforced that with DS2 ultimately ending the character's arc as a villain (how many people did she murder in that movie)?

Thor 4 has us following the god of thunder as he has to "find himself" again for the 4th (?) time in the last 10 years of his 1500 years of life? So, I guess you can say there's some consistency there...

Spider-Man No Way Home, while enjoyable, completely changed the trajectory of SM that they'd been building up until that point. In all of his previous appearances they were building him up like the next Tony Stark, but then they wiped it all away. Which, fine, I'm interested in seeing what they do with a "street level" Spider-Man story or trilogy or whatever they do, but we spent 3 movies building up him and his cast of characters to have it wiped away. Spider-Man going through adversity is on-brand, but it's a completely unforshadowed direction for the character with everything they set up in the MCU up till that point.

They couldn't do anything about the change that had to happen with Black Panther, but it results in yet another complete change.

GotG3 is going to end the arc of those characters from what it sounds like.

Steve gives Sam the shield at the end of Endgame, and then all of FatWS happens because Sam gives the shield away in opposition to Steve's wishes. It isn't even the real shield. That got destroyed in the fight with Thanos...

 LordofHats wrote:
If I were to put a finger on it, it's definitely not super hero fatigue so much as 'global ever rising stakes fatigue.'

World saved! Galaxy Saved! Multiverse saved!

Even better, the more extreme the threat the more common morality and collateral damage is irrelevant!

Also the increasing disconnect between the powerful characters and the Hawkeyes of this world. By making everyone's power about shooting or punching the baddies you see that you simply don't need the 'normal' ones. Thor 4 was terrible, especially after Thor 3, but it did highlight the Guardians are essentially irrelevant if Thor is around, an immortal with the power of a (minor) God.

Looking back over the recent slate of superhero films, I liked Suicide Squad 2 as trashy fun, Spider man as memberberry overload and having the plot revolve around figuring stuff out (even if punching at same time) and Ragnarock as proper comic book silliness (and that is now for coming out a long time ago...). I struggle to even remember the rest.

Well, I finished Agent Carter season 2, and it was very underwhelming and ended on a cliffhanger that will never be resolved. Too bad, I enjoyed its run better than Agents of Shield's long, convoluted run.

With Iger back, do you guy's think most of the D+ shows are going to be scrapped going forward to re-focus on movies only? That was the business plan that worked in the past.

 Easy E wrote:
Well, I finished Agent Carter season 2, and it was very underwhelming and ended on a cliffhanger that will never be resolved. Too bad, I enjoyed its run better than Agents of Shield's long, convoluted run.

With Iger back, do you guy's think most of the D+ shows are going to be scrapped going forward to re-focus on movies only? That was the business plan that worked in the past.

Depends.

The TV Series for me worked because of the sort of stories they were telling. Essentially, the fall out from the undoing of The Snap, and just how much both snaps messed the world up.

Now? We just don’t have the same fall out from any of Phase 4. When we get through with Kang? Who knows. Possibly. Depends just how bad things get when fighting him off.

Just as I don’t want movies for movies sake (such as cheaply made FF4 just to keep the rights), I don’t want a movie concept stretched out to be a TV series for sake of getting another TV Series out.

Economy of story telling. That’s what’s important. Take the right amount of time to tell your tale. Not a minute longer. Not a minute shorter. WandaVision, FalconSoldier and Loki all managed that nicely.

I think there will be less drive for D+ shows but i think there is an advantage to the format for specific kinds of stories. We would never get Wanda Vision or Loki as a movie.

Marvel Studios has the ability to utilize the format when the story would benefit from it. So they should.

WandaVision and Loki are the two of the bunch that weren't obviously movie scripts that had been chopped up and loaded with filler to stretch to a TV schedule. Nothing suffered more from this than The Book of Boba Fett though.

Cancellations are inevitable. Feige is on record as saying that there is a shift on to less frequent, higher quality content.

Some shows may get simply pushed back, but others are going to fail to find a slot in the schedule where they remain relevant (I suspect Agatha will be this eventually, they just don't want to make that public right away for whatever reason.)

 LunarSol wrote:
WandaVision and Loki are the two of the bunch that weren't obviously movie scripts that had been chopped up and loaded with filler to stretch to a TV schedule. Nothing suffered more from this than The Book of Boba Fett though.

Certainly comparing Book of Boba Fett to The Mandalorian, and Andor in particular is a good example.

But I do stress BoBF is, if we’re honest, only poor when directly compared to its stablemates. As a TV show, looked at in isolation? There’s bugger all wrong with it. And indeed, it not being a simple story spun out over 24 episodes of exactly 45 minutes to meet syndication standards meant whilst we probably can argue there was some filler? It wasn’t drowning out the cool bits.

All I think I’d do with a super cut is rework it, so we get all the Boba of Arabia bits over and done with as separate episodes, probably nice and upfront. Even then, having recently binged it, it does work better watched as a whole than episodically.

If you take BOBF in isolation you have to explain why it suddenly comes to a screeching halt and turns into a different show for two episodes...

Fair point. But overall, it’s not a bad bit of entertainment.

Like. At all.

Decent acting. Decent story. Decent cinematography. Decent action. It’s all there. It’s just….not quite as good as its stablemates.

That’s like saying *insert world champion pugilist here*’s protégé or sparring partner, by dint of not being *inserted world champion pugilist* is therefore……soft as a pot of mashed potato made in a nursing home for the terminally toothless and swallowing challenged.

It’s not the same thing.

BOBF was dismal. The fact that it just turned into a different show 5 episodes in shows that. And that finale... Jesus...

I think that we'll see less reactionary spin-offs. No Echos or Agatha's moving forward. And more things that aren't just vehicles for introducing a new character.

Hope this change doesn't kill Armor Wars.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Cancellations are inevitable. Feige is on record as saying that there is a shift on to less frequent, higher quality content.

Some shows may get simply pushed back, but others are going to fail to find a slot in the schedule where they remain relevant (I suspect Agatha will be this eventually, they just don't want to make that public right away for whatever reason.)

I disagree with Agatha.

I think Wanda is a vital component of the Secret Wars conclusion (putting the universe back together). And part of getting Wanda back is getting her kids in the mix. Which is ostensibly what Agatha is actually about. The MCU version of Children's Crusade.

I think Agatha is too important to put aside.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Fair point. But overall, it’s not a bad bit of entertainment.

Like. At all.

Decent acting. Decent story. Decent cinematography. Decent action. It’s all there. It’s just….not quite as good as its stablemates.

That’s like saying *insert world champion pugilist here*’s protégé or sparring partner, by dint of not being *inserted world champion pugilist* is therefore……soft as a pot of mashed potato made in a nursing home for the terminally toothless and swallowing challenged.

It’s not the same thing.

I disagree with this pretty much entirely. BoBF was terrible story. Good acting sure. But what the hell was it even about? Flash Back to Dances with Sand People while in the modern day Bobba Fett has become a 'good person" trying to run a crime empire. Even when there was action it was confused. A low speed chance on "speeders". A pause to get a giant monster for a fight with a couple droids with canons for no good reason. The show was a mess from the beginning.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
WandaVision and Loki are the two of the bunch that weren't obviously movie scripts that had been chopped up and loaded with filler to stretch to a TV schedule. Nothing suffered more from this than The Book of Boba Fett though.

Certainly comparing Book of Boba Fett to The Mandalorian, and Andor in particular is a good example.

But I do stress BoBF is, if we’re honest, only poor when directly compared to its stablemates. As a TV show, looked at in isolation? There’s bugger all wrong with it. And indeed, it not being a simple story spun out over 24 episodes of exactly 45 minutes to meet syndication standards meant whilst we probably can argue there was some filler? It wasn’t drowning out the cool bits.

All I think I’d do with a super cut is rework it, so we get all the Boba of Arabia bits over and done with as separate episodes, probably nice and upfront. Even then, having recently binged it, it does work better watched as a whole than episodically.

The thing about Boba is that its stretched so thin you can see the gears underneath. The uncanny vibe of the whole thing seems to come from the way that scraps of meat are kind of draped here and there but not in an order that flows naturally. Even towards the end, there's REALLY weird bits of repeated story beats, like the Pike leader revealing to Cad Bane they had killed the Tuskens in a way that is framed as a shock to the audience followed by Cad revealing it to Boba in a way that is supposed to shock the audience? They keep repeating the bacta sequence but they don't have a really natural reason for it. These things feel like they were designed to happen once and just get reused to buy time.

If I was a gambler, I'd wager the original script looked something like this:
- Cold open action sequence of Boba storming Jabba's palace and taking the throne
- Bobba runs his empire and comes into conflict with the Pykes.
- Bobba is wounded in Pyke reprisal, is put in Bacta to recover.
- Flashback of Bobba escaping the sarlac, being rescued by the Tuskens and finding a family among them.
- Bobba wakes up and prepares for war with the Pykes
- Bobba hunts down the Pyke leader and kills him, revealing that it had all been done to get revenge for killing his Tusken family.

This isn't really a "how I would have done it better kind of thing, IMO. This feels like the script they were working from and just attached random things in where they could to fill time. Stuff happens in weird orders to try and make episodes with a semi contained narrative but there's no plot to any of it. It's really noticeable, even compared to other films that got reworked to shows. I think the only thing close to it in terms of being awkwardly chopped up for television is probably Ms Marvel.

 Lance845 wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Cancellations are inevitable. Feige is on record as saying that there is a shift on to less frequent, higher quality content.

Some shows may get simply pushed back, but others are going to fail to find a slot in the schedule where they remain relevant (I suspect Agatha will be this eventually, they just don't want to make that public right away for whatever reason.)

I disagree with Agatha.

I think Wanda is a vital component of the Secret Wars conclusion (putting the universe back together). And part of getting Wanda back is getting her kids in the mix. Which is ostensibly what Agatha is actually about. The MCU version of Children's Crusade.

I think Agatha is too important to put aside.

If that's what they intended, then fair enough. But my impression with Agatha was it was a shoehorned in show because of positive audience reactions to the character, rather than something woven into the overall arc from the get go.

Obviously things can be changed, and the reported delays might be just because of that, but if my impression is that it's sort of "stuck on" to the MCU rather than integrated from an early stage is correct, I can see it going in the bin. Especially as I can see Vision Quest being the intended show to do what you're talking about, which could very much still pinch stuff from Coven if it's warranted.

 Azreal13 wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Cancellations are inevitable. Feige is on record as saying that there is a shift on to less frequent, higher quality content.

Some shows may get simply pushed back, but others are going to fail to find a slot in the schedule where they remain relevant (I suspect Agatha will be this eventually, they just don't want to make that public right away for whatever reason.)

I disagree with Agatha.

I think Wanda is a vital component of the Secret Wars conclusion (putting the universe back together). And part of getting Wanda back is getting her kids in the mix. Which is ostensibly what Agatha is actually about. The MCU version of Children's Crusade.

I think Agatha is too important to put aside.

If that's what they intended, then fair enough. But my impression with Agatha was it was a shoehorned in show because of positive audience reactions to the character, rather than something woven into the overall arc from the get go.

Obviously things can be changed, and the reported delays might be just because of that, but if my impression is that it's sort of "stuck on" to the MCU rather than integrated from an early stage is correct, I can see it going in the bin. Especially as I can see Vision Quest being the intended show to do what you're talking about, which could very much still pinch stuff from Coven if it's warranted.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Agatha was their original plan to get those pieces into place. We know things changed. Multiverse of Madness became a very different movie because of covid with America Chavez originally set to appear in Spiderman No Way Home (released concept art shows her). But they had pieces they needed moved into place, right? We need to introduce the Young Avengers. That includes America. So when she isn't over here we need another spot for her. Wiccan and Speed (Wandas Kids) get their set up in Wanda Vision. With MoM going the way it did it sets up Children's Crusade to introduce their older versions that join those Young Avengers. Where can we do that? Well, people responded well to Agatha. What if we did a Children's Crusade with a Agatha lead?

I think Agatha was created to get the pieces they knew they needed in the place they needed them with an opportunity to capitalize on a popular character and tell a decent story. So here it is.

I don't think it's a disposable story. Something they can just scrap the way they did with the Inhumans movie because Marvel Studios never wanted to make it in the first place. I think this is a story MS wanted to tell to set up their future plans and they just need to spread it all out longer so that things don't get so messy.