Marvel Clarifies Whether Thunderbolts Is Now Titled The New Avengers

This article contains spoilers for "Thunderbolts*."

Marvel Cinematic Universe fans who have been online within the last day or so may have noticed that Marvel's new "Thunderbolts*" posters finally revealed the asterisk's meaning, and that said meaning utterly spoils a certain aspect of the movie's ending. It turns out that "Thunderbolts" isn't really a Thunderbolts movie — instead of focusing on a version of the titular team from the comics that falls toward the black ops end of the spectrum, the movie is an origin story of a completely different and somewhat more heroic group: the New Avengers. 

An abrupt title change like this is the kind of thing that might risk causing confusion. Likely to minimize such issues, the studio has decided that clarity about the movie's title is needed. Despite various marketing stunts that seem to suggest an official title change, Disney has confirmed to Deadline that "Thunderbolts*" has not been officially renamed. The film is still very much called "Thunderbolts*," and the new "retitling" marketing campaign has simply focused on revealing what that mysterious asterisk actually means. 

There has been public talk of a "Thunderbolts" film since at least 2018, when Hannah John-Kamen expressed interest in playing Ghost in a "Thunderbolts"-themed project. She ended up getting her wish, and "Thunderbolts" — at this point without the infamous asterisk — was announced at San Diego Comic-Con 2022. The asterisk was added in the title in March 2024, and now, the slow burn mystery behind it has finally ended.

As marketing campaigns go, tinkering with the very title of a movie is certainly ambitious. Effective, too, as people have been making plenty of guesses about the asterisk — for one, /Film's own Kieran Fisher analyzed Marvel's own revelations about the "Thunderbolts*" title and landed on the correct answer in February 2025. It will be fascinating to be seen how the campaign's "*New Avengers" endgame impacts "Thunderbolts*" becoming a hit or a flop, and how the result influences the MCU's future marketing strategies.