Baron Zemo and Kang Were in Early Drafts of Thunderbolts (and Other Rejected Ideas)

Eric Pearson, who co-wrote the new Marvel movie Thunderbolts with Joanna Calo, has revealed some of the characters who were considered for the movie’s post-credits scene, among them Baron Zemo and Kang the Conqueror.

In a conversation with the writer, he explained to me that while he took a couple of stabs at post-credits scenes for Thunderbolts, the Hollywood strikes interfered with the production of the film. Things were paused for six or seven months and then had to go back into pre-production, but the Marvel landscape had changed by then. And that led to a rethinking on the post-credits front as well, which of course are typically used to tee up incoming MCU projects.

“So I was throwing together at the beginning a post-credit sequence that had to deal with Kang,” says the writer.

Of course, while the villainous Kang was being positioned to be a major bad guy in the Multiverse Saga, actor Jonathan Majors’ legal problems led to his being fired by Marvel and the character essentially dropped from the ongoing MCU story. But there were other, more surprising characters considered for Thunderbolts as well.

“[Another idea] had to deal with more of a direct relation to the fact that [Julia Louis-Dreyfus’] Valentina [Allegra de Fontaine] sent Yelena after Clint Barton, after Hawkeye, [for] the Hawkeye show,” continues Pearson. “But as time passes, you're like, well, is anyone going to make that connection still to the thing that they haven't seen in two or three years?”

Again, it makes sense that such an old reference – the Hawkeye Disney+ series debuted in 2021 – wouldn’t really fit in a 2025 movie release. But then there were also the characters who would seem to fit in the sense that they were part of the Thunderbolts comic-book landscape.

“We wanted to do something different than ‘authority figure forces criminals to work together,’” says Pearson. “And once you take that out, the people from the comics who have put them together [the team] in the past, the Baron Zemos, the Thunderbolt Rosses, they don't fit the narrative in the same way. So while we're very aware and we talked about these ideas and, hey, if there was ever a way to include them, it's great because it makes sense and it honors the comics. But we also didn't want to break our story that we were excited about just to do fan service.”

Pearson also confirmed that Thunderbolt Ross, most recently played by Harrison Ford in Captain America: Brave New World, was never considered for Thunderbolts (similar names notwithstanding). That said, Zemo, who has been played by Daniel Brühl in Avengers: Civil War and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, at least made it into a draft, albeit briefly.

“There was definitely a [post-credits] tag that I did a million years ago where Zemo is like Keyser Söze,” says Pearson, referring to the character from The Usual Suspects. “Like he's been pulling the strings from prison in some way. But I don't think that iteration lived longer than like, ‘Hey, what about this?’ ‘Nope, not that.’”

Thunderbolts is in theaters now!