One ‘Thunderbolts*’ Character Almost Had a Different Storyline

The following post contains some spoilers for Thunderbolts*, all about the Taskmaster character.

All Marvel movies go through an extensive process of rewrites, before, during, and after shooting is complete. The writers have their ideas, the director brings in more, and Marvel itself, of course, has a lot of input as well. Even after things are shot, Marvel might reshoot it, especially if something in their long-term plan changes, and the change conflicts with whatever they had previously filmed. There’s never been a Marvel movie that looked exactly how it was originally envisioned on the page.

In the case of Marvel’s latest film, Thunderbolts*, one of its two credited scriptwriters, Eric Pearson, says a lot of the movie is what he originally planned, and follows the blueprint he laid out in the movie’s earliest drafts. But in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he did reveal the single biggest change from the script to the final product — Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster was originally a central character throughout the entire story. (In the finished film, she is killed extremely early in the story by Ghost.)

As Pearson explained it:

When I saw the first cut, the biggest change was Taskmaster taking that shot, and I was shocked. In my drafts, Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster lived out the movie, and she had a bit of a subplot with Ava/Ghost. They’d both been raised in labs, and Ava big-sistered her into how to break free and be her own person.

Marvel

That’s certainly an interesting change, especially since it is Ghost who kills Taskmaster in the finished film. Pearson said he understood the change, which was “probably just because of my audience reaction of being genuinely surprised.”

“[Director] Jake [Schreier] said ‘We wanted to surprise the audience and raise the stakes and say, ‘Yeah, there’s danger here. No one’s safe,’” Pearson added. And they certainly achieved that. It’s not the ideal outcome for Taskmaster (or Kurylenko!) though.

Thunderbolts* is in theaters now.