Yeah, that was very exciting. I thought, “Well, if I get this movie, I’m the new director of ‘Avengers,’” and then it was made very clear to me that was not the case: “No, no, you’re making ‘Thunderbolts.’” But in its own way, that’s where these discussions about the asterisk came from. In my last pitch, I said, “Oh, we should do one Instagram post where we put an asterisk on the title and say, ‘Until we come up with something better,’ to kind of tease this idea.” They really ran with that, and we were thinking, “We’re going to introduce them as the New Avengers right at the end of the movie, and then in the credits sequence, it’s going to be a little weird if you just go back to ‘Thunderbolts.’” That started this idea of, “Could you actually switch the name out at the end?”
The title switch leads to a montage of skeptical headlines about these people becoming the New Avengers.
To be honest, that came from testing. When I was making the movie and listening to the score and imagining that moment, I assumed there’d be a cheer. When we actually tested it, it was more of an uncertain, halting applause and people didn’t know how to feel about it at first. That’s where the title sequence comes from: It felt like we needed to show the audience that we understood this isn’t necessarily obvious or even going to work but hopefully you come to embrace it, and that sequence could take you through that process.
That makes it sound like the post-credits scenes aren’t necessarily set in stone when you begin.
Yeah, it is fluid. Kevin was always really good at being responsive to how the material feels and feeling where to take the next steps with the franchise. I directed one of the post-credit scenes and not the other: I did the grocery one and then the second post-credit scene was filmed just a month ago in London as part of the production [of “Avengers: Doomsday,” due in 2026 from the directors Joe and Anthony Russo]. I was there, and we talked about what it needed to do for our characters, but Florence said it was like being dropped off at school by your parents as they wave goodbye.
You included the Taskmaster character in all the posters, even though she’s killed moments into her only scene. In some trailers, she was even superimposed to appear as if she would be part of the team for the whole movie. Take me into those decisions.
