Bob in Marvel’s Thunderbolts* film brings Sentry to the MCU

A new trailer for Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts* could not have revealed why there’s an asterisk within the title — bracing for a Darkish Avengers reveal on the finish — but it surely did tease an sudden addition to the group: Bob.

Who’s Bob? Bob’s a man in hospital scrubs who simply occurs to be on a group solely populated by skilled assassins, excellent soldier program rejects, and accidents of Science who turned to tremendous crime, all kitted out to the nines with tremendous tech. Which, by the legal guidelines of all good Soiled Dozen-style narrative set ups, means he’s should be essentially the most terrifying man right here.

A fast shot of an iconic belt buckle from later within the trailer (and affirmation from Deadline in July), all however confirms his identification: Bob, performed by Lewis Pullman (Outer Vary, Prime Gun: Maverick), is the MCU model of one in every of Marvel’s strongest and least steady superheroes.

There’s just one Marvel superhero who wears an enormous S on his belt, goes by “Bob,” and wouldn’t be uncommon to see within the institutional garb of a psychological affected person, and that’s the Sentry.

Created by author Paul Jenkins and artist Jae Lee in 2000’s Sentry miniseries for Marvel’s mature-fare imprint, Marvel Knights, Robert Reynolds wields cosmos-shaking energy because the superhero often called the Sentry. Following an encounter with one of many world’s innumerable makes an attempt to breed Steve Rogers’ tremendous soldier serum, he gained Superman-like powers — together with immense energy, pace, flight, invulnerability, enhanced senses, and photo voltaic power absorption — and a few extras, like molecular manipulation and thoughts manipulation.

His heroic adventures because the Sentry started even earlier than the looks of the Improbable 4, and he was quick buddies with the Avengers, Spider-Man, and principally everyone else on the nice facet of the Marvel universe. That’s, till he realized that he was linked with an equally highly effective and correspondingly evil entity often called the Void, and the one technique to nullify it was to cease utilizing his powers and make everybody within the universe overlook that the Sentry had ever existed.

That was the story, no less than, till 2004’s New Avengers, from author Brian Michael Bendis and numerous artists, when the character was given a really post-9/11 twist: Supervillains had mucked with Reynolds’ thoughts to make him consider he needed to cease being a superhero, and the superior energy of his unconscious psychic skills had made the lie actual. Since then, comics have gone forwards and backwards with reveals and retcons, tweaking and altering who precisely Robert Reynolds, the Sentry, and the Void are.

Did the Sentry make everybody overlook him to be able to counteract the Void and reside as a traditional man? Is the Void a mirror entity to the Sentry’s powers, or Reynolds’ personal alternate character, as expressed with the Sentry’s powers? Is it a manifestation of Reynolds’ worry of his misusing his skills, delivered to actuality by his personal psychic energy? Or was that worry itself implanted in Reynolds by a supervillain to be able to destroy him and all reminiscences of him?

Thunderbolts* has all of those explanations to select from, on high of merely inventing their very own bespoke model of the Void/Sentry/Robert dynamic. The one actual throughline with the character is that he’s a supremely highly effective Superman analogue known as the Sentry, whose presence attracts an equally highly effective evil entity known as the Void, which, itself, could or will not be a product of Reynolds’ fragile psyche.

Does this imply the final word villain opposing the Thunderbolts would be the Void? Hopefully not, as a result of that’s precisely the plot of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, simply swapping out the Sentry for the same “I’ve bought an evil entity inside me” character of the Enchantress.

However both manner, we’ll discover out on Might 2, 2025, when Thunderbolts* (or no matter it’s known as after we discover out what the asterisk means) hits theaters.