Steven Yeun has exited the Marvel Studios project, reportedly due to scheduling issues following last year’s strikes.
We already know that Marvel Studios is having to carefully ponder what to do with the Kang character, following the studio’s dismissal of Jonathan Majors. Now it seems that it has another character’s future to figure out, with several of the Hollywood trades reporting that Nope's Steven Yeun has dropped out of Thunderbolts.
As far as we’re aware, the impact of last year’s strikes meant that actual production work on Thunderbolts never began, although it was only around a month away from shooting when the writer’s strike in May resulted in work on the film being suspended.
It’s looking likely that production will be commencing around March or April of this year, but the ensemble will be missing one key name: Steven Yeun.
While Yeun’s role was never officially confirmed, a series of leaks claimed that he was set to play Sentry, a Superman-like character who would certainly make for an interesting addition to a film largely focused on a team of misfits and anti-heroes. If this is true, we wonder if the Sentry character may well feature as the film’s antagonist, a mighty challenge for the newly-formed Thunderbolts team to overcome?
Should that prove to be the case, the loss of Yeun – brough to light by The Hollywood Reporter – is a sizeable one. As was evidenced by The Marvels, the Marvel Cinematic Universe still frequently struggles to create compelling characters to star opposite its heroes. Having an actor with Yeun’s profile and talents would certainly have been a huge step in the right direction.
That’s doubly true given that the actor would have been working with the same creatives from the Netflix series Beef ,and perhaps rekindled some of the crackling energy that the acclaimed show possessed.
Scheduling issues are believed to be the problem, given that six months of strikes have thrown everything up into the air.
Yeun is rumoured to be featuring in Jordan Peele’s next film which we suspect may be going into production around the same time as Thunderbolts, so perhaps the actor has had to make a difficult decision and step away from a project that would undoubtedly have been elevated by his talents.
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 (US Agent), Hannah John-Kamen (Ghost), Olga Kurylenko (Taskmaster) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Valentina Allegra de Fontaine)’ all set to appear. Harrison Ford is also on board.
We’ll being you more on Thunderbolts as we hear it, although we have heard that you won’t need to do loads of ‘Marvel homework’ to understand what’s going on.
