10 Marvel Super Teams That Should Be In The MCU

In the absence of the big hitter superhero teams in 1997 after an apocalyptic worldwide crisis, a team of new heroes debut on the global stage to reassure the people that they're still protected.

That team are the Thunderbolts: devil-may-care patriot and their swashbuckling leader, Citizen V; Atlas, who can grow to vast size; human jet fighter MACH-1; high-technology savant Techno; sonic seductress Songbird; and cosmically-powered Meteorite, the team’s second in command.

Appearing to be noble new heroes stepping up into the limelight to help save the world, the Thunderbolts are enthusiastically accepted by the media, who need a good human interest story to add to a news cycle dogged by loss and anxiety.

So They're Kind Of The New Avengers, Then?

Well... yes and no. What no one realises (including the reader) is that the Thunderbolts aren't real superheroes.

More specifically, they're all supervillains - wolves in sheeps' clothing. Citizen V is really Baron Zemo, heir to the Nazi’s plans for world domination, and the Thunderbolts are the latest line-up of his Masters Of Evil: career bad guys Goliath, The Beetle, Screaming Mimi, The Fixer and Moonstone.

A Team Of Super-Villains? Sounds Like A Rip-Off Of DC's Suicide Squad

Not quite. The Suicide Squad are bad guy convicts in a secret government programme, running Dirty Dozen style missions to get time off their sentences. The Thunderbolts have a secret agenda: their plan is to gain the people's trust in order to conquer the world from under the radar.

And No One Figures This Out? Hmmm.

Well, with Earth’s mightiest heroes vanished, there's no one to figure anything out: but as well as that, several members of the team begin to like being superheroes. That leads to a violent schism within the group.

With the Avengers and everyone attached to them off fighting the Infinity War, Marvel’s Phase Four is a perfect time to develop the Thunderbolts as a stand-alone movie, and there’s plenty of drama involved in the story of a team of bad guys pretending to be good guys, who begin to reform almost against their will.

That initial swerve isn’t going to work this time, however: so it’d be best to use the ‘secret’ of the team’s real, villainous motives as a selling point rather than to try and keep schtum about it.