More Marvel projects may yet delay in the wake of Blade and Thunderbolts being paused until the ongoing writers’ strike is resolved.
Marvel Studios has elected to press the pause button on Thunderbolts, just as the film was gearing up to enter production in Atlanta next month. Jake Schreier is the project’s director, with the script having gone through several writers, including Black Widow scribe Eric Pearson and most recently Beef creator Lee Sung Jin.
Despite the script seemingly being in good enough shape for the film to enter production, the suspension of Thunderbolts highlights how even with projects of this scale, the writing process continues throughout production with revisions, jokes and (especially with Marvel) entire third acts often being reworked on the fly.
The film is set to focus on some on Marvel’s less illustrious characters being formed into a Dirty Dozen-style team, with ‘Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova), Sebastian Stan (Winter Soldier), David Harbour (Red Guardian), Wyatt Russell (U.S. Agent), Hannah John-Kamen (Ghost), Olga Kurylenko (Taskmaster) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Valentina Allegra de Fontaine)’ all set to appear. Steven Yeun and Harrison Ford are also on board.
Marvel Studios has already paused work on Blade (and not for the first time), whilst it’s hard to imagine Deadpool 3 (which has just started shooting in the UK) will be able to continue given the loose, comedic style of those films. Whilst it may seem like a fairly tangential point, we’re already a bit worried for the CGI industry as we’ve just seen its workers endure some torrid times in the last couple of years as the post-Covid logjam created some undesirable working conditions. A lengthy strike action could have the same effect all over again, normalising harmful industry processes that really should be under some sort of review.
We’ll bring you more on production suspensions as the ongoing WGA strike continues to bite.
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