The Writer of Thunderbolts Was Spoiled on The Last of Us Season 2… Because of The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Spoilers follow for Thunderbolts and The Last of Us Season 2.

Spoilers and spoiler-phobic culture have evolved over the years, including not just how fans perceive what a spoiler is but also what the Hollywood marketing machine even considers to be a spoiler. Go back and watch Michael Keaton give away the big “the Joker killed Batman’s parents” twist on Letterman the day before the movie came out in 1989, for example. Imagine that happening today?

Well, it turns out even Hollywood filmmakers worry about being spoiled on stuff these days. Take Eric Pearson, co-writer of Thunderbolts/The New Avengers, who was annoyed to be spoiled on the death of Pedro Pascal’s character Joel in the current season of The Last of Us. The thing is, he was spoiled through less conventional means than most of us would be…

“I found out about the fate of [Joel in] Episode 2 by learning about Pedro's schedule for Fantastic Four last year,” the writer recently told me. “So I was like, well, I know what's going to happen now in that show that I like that's not coming out for another year. So annoying.”

The topic of spoilers came up with Pearson when we were discussing the Thunderbolts character Bob/Sentry (Lewis Pullman), who is teased in the trailers as a random character who just winds up in the company of Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Red Guardian (David Harbour), and the rest. As he explained, the memory loss element of the Sentry in the Marvel Comics was an aspect that Pearson wanted to play into in the movie version. But the reality is anything from the source material of a comic-book movie in the post-MCU world is pretty hard to keep quiet.

“You put that into just the fun of, hey, there's some guy named Bob in this impenetrable vault where we're all supposed to kill each other and he's in medical scrubs. What the hell is he doing here?” said Pearson. “Of course, the internet has to figure everything out and spoil it all. But in those beautiful, innocent days when we thought maybe somebody wouldn't just spoil everything, it was like, oh, who's Bob? Let's have a lot of fun with nobody understanding and nobody knowing why this random guy is there.”

But then Bob wound up in the trailers, of course, and the fans quickly put together that he was Bob Reynolds, aka the Sentry. And that was that.

“I would prefer it not to have [been spoiled in the trailers], but you can't help it really,” he continued. “You can't help the marketing choices.”

Perhaps we’re all part of the spoiler problem. Pearson remembers watching the trailer for Zack Snyder’s 300 “a billion times” before it came out in 2006, especially the rousing moment when Leonidas (Gerard Butler) kicks an unfortunate messenger into a well.

“And then you get to the part in the movie where he is right next to the hole and he's going to kick him in … and you're sitting there in the theater going, ‘Kick him in the hole already!’” laughs Pearson. “The trailer trained my brain not to enjoy that scene because I know he is going to get kicked in the hole. … I'm equally as guilty. I watch all the trailers and whenever I get to see a movie that I haven't seen the trailer for, I enjoy it so much more. But we're fiends for this stuff, so what are you supposed to do, really? I can't blame anyone.”

Still, there is the great hope of the people who… just go see a movie like Thunderbolts without googling “Bob Marvel explained” or what have you. Maybe they never even saw the trailer before they went to the movie! Regular folks who go in just looking to enjoy a movie like Thunderbolts. Surely, such folks were at least surprised by the Bob twist.

“I do hope more people go in with less knowledge,” says the writer.

And you know what? Those same people probably weren’t spoiled on Joel or the 1989 Joker reveal either.