One Thunderbolts Character’s Fate Was a Huge ‘Shock’ Even to the Writer of the Movie
Writer Eric Pearson wrote the early drafts for the new Marvel movie Thunderbolts. But even he was shocked by the fate of one of the film's characters.
Spoilers follow for Thunderbolts.
Some MCU fans had assumed that Marvel’s Thunderbolts – which you may have heard is now Marvel’s The New Avengers – would kill off at least a few of its (seemingly) mostly disposable team of anti-heroes. But when the “directors chair” Avengers: Doomsday announcement in March revealed the metric ton of characters who are returning for that film included most of the Thunderbolts, the fan theories were forced to go in another direction. Still, one character was conspicuous by their absence in that reveal: Olga Kurylenko’s Antonia Dreykov, aka Taskmaster.
Around the same time, the ever-watchful fans also kind of figured out that Taskmaster was doomed due to her disappearance from key moments in the trailers. And indeed, the character is in fact unceremoniously killed off early on in Thunderbolts/The New Avengers.
The thing is, according to the film’s co-writer Eric Pearson, Taskmaster was originally intended to have a much bigger part in the movie. And she was meant to have an important connection to fellow team member Hannah John-Kamen’s Ava Starr/Ghost too.
“That's one of the biggest changes from my final draft, because in the last version that I did, [Taskmaster] lived out the whole movie and there was a pretty big subplot of her and Ava connecting as two characters that were raised in labs and being controlled by other people,” explains Pearson.
It makes sense considering Ghost’s Ant-Man and the Wasp backstory is one of secret experimentation and forced acts of violence. “Ava having earned her autonomy a little bit earlier, Antonia was big-sistering her a little bit through the movie,” says the writer.
But the nature of the MCU movie factory – and big-budget blockbusters in general, really – means that Pearson eventually moved on to other projects, particularly with the delays in production on Thunderbolts caused by the Hollywood strikes. And so other writers continued work on the film, including his credited co-writer Joanna Calo.
“When I came back and watched the first cut, that was the biggest shock to me,” recalls Pearson. “Everything else was in the same place, but I was like, ‘Oh my God, you guys just killed the Taskmaster right there.’ So being able to not know what's coming and feel that shock, I understood why they did it, but yeah.”
Pearson says that even though he was surprised by the character’s fate, he understands why the changes to the script were made. (“The journey was even more emotional than I expected it to be,” he says. “I was just thrilled.”) He also confirms that most of the additional material he wrote about Taskmaster was never actually filmed. There was, however, a version of the elevator shaft scene that was different from the one in the finished film where John Walker tries to jump up to escape the shaft. In his script, the scene involved Taskmaster.
“I think they shot it with actually Ava doing the Taskmaster role,” he recalls. “Taskmaster was supposed to pull the bow and arrow [out] and shoot a grappling hook straight up. … And the idea that they all just stand there and look, waiting for the thing to cling, to stick in, and then one of them notices that the rope is coiling up and the thing is coming back down and they all just panic and have to run around like headless chickens because they know this arrow is coming down and they don't know where. And it sticks right in the middle of them. I loved that moment. I missed it, but I can't complain. The movie is spiritually everything that I wanted it to be.”
What do you think? Would Thunderbolts/The New Avengers have been better if Taskmaster hadn’t been killed off so early in the story? Vote in our poll and let’s discuss in the comments.
