Ever because the first Thunderbolts* trailer got here out, sharp-eyed Marvel Cinematic Universe followers have been theorizing about one explicit hole between the solid record and the footage launched. Black Widow villain Antonia Dreykov, aka Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), seems on the film’s poster and advertising, however is noticeably absent from different scenes and pictures within the promotional materials, resulting in hypothesis that her position within the film is pretty minimal. That wound up being true — although unique Thunderbolts* screenwriter Eric Pearson (Black Widow, Unbelievable 4: First Steps) tells Polygon he wrote a way more concerned arc for her.
He additionally says he solely came upon how radically her position had been altered when he was sitting in an early screening, watching the film, which “shocked the hell” out of him.
[Ed. note: Significant spoilers ahead about Taskmaster’s situation in Thunderbolts*.]
Picture: Marvel Studios by way of Everett Assortment
Black Widow units up Antonia because the cyborg-ized, mind-controlled daughter and supreme weapon of Dreykov (Ray Winstone), the final behind each the Soviet model of the super-soldier-serum challenge that produced Crimson Guardian (David Harbour) and the torturous Crimson Room program that turned Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and her sister Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) into super-assassins. By the tip of Black Widow, Dreykov is useless, which leaves Antonia to place her personal super-assassin abilities (and talent to imitate anybody’s preventing model) to extra worthwhile work, serving as a mercenary for CIA director and mega-schemer Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).
When Valentina faces impeachment and doable arrest for her many crimes early in Thunderbolts*, she tries to cowl her tracks by sending all her operatives to a high-security vault on the identical time with completely different data and assassination assignments, hoping they’ll wipe one another out. Most of her mercs — Yelena (from Black Widow and Hawkeye), John Walker/US Agent (Wyatt Russell) from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) from Ant Man and The Wasp — all survive the group’s first confrontation. Antonia doesn’t. Ghost weapons her down. There aren’t any shock reveals the place she survived that encounter, a minimum of not on this film — she seems to die, and shortly after that, to be incinerated.
All of which got here as an entire shock to Pearson. “It was determined after my work,” he instructed Polygon. “After I sat down to look at the primary minimize, one factor was completely completely different and shocked the hell out of me, and it was that. All the pieces else, I used to be like, ‘Yeah, that’s the film that I wrote!’ However that call…”
So far as why Taskmaster was faraway from the film, Pearson says he doesn’t know: “You’d must ask [director] Jake Schreier or [Marvel Studios president] Kevin [Feige] or [co-credited screenwriter] Joanna [Calo], perhaps. But when I had been to guess, it will be to get the response that I had as an viewers member, like, ‘Whoa, we’re upping the stakes, we’re doing one thing drastic actually quick, and we’re placing everyone on edge.’”
Pearson says that within the remaining draft of his script, Antonia/Taskmaster survives for your complete film, and was the middle of “a fairly large subplot.” His script had Taskmaster bonding with Ava, who, as we discovered in Ant-Man and the Wasp, gained quantum-shifting powers in a lab accident that killed her mother and father, and was subsequently discovered by SHIELD, raised in a lab, and skilled as a weapon. Pearson felt they’d have rather a lot in frequent “as individuals who’d grown up in labs and been managed that manner.
“And Ava, having received her autonomy earlier within the chronology than Taskmaster, was sort of big-sistering her a bit bit, in a manner of ‘find out how to break away and be your personal particular person,’” Pearson says.
He additionally feels that Taskmaster’s presence helped rein in a few of the different characters’ tendency for self-pity: “I imply, everybody in there has suffered a ton of tragedy,” he says. “However she was sort of the last word tragedy. Within the outdated tragedy rankings, she was on the high, and the opposite, greater personalities — nobody might get out of line, as a result of nobody might say ‘I had it worse than you.’”
His model of Taskmaster additionally enabled a operating joke about her tendency to neglect she’d moved previous making an attempt to assassinate John Walker, and go after him once more. “On the comedy aspect, she was struggling along with her personal memory-loss stuff, and there was a gag the place she simply saved restarting the struggle and forgetting that they’d made up and turn out to be pals.” he says.
“They might be discussing the plan of find out how to get out [of the vault], and she or he’d simply go after him once more, they usually’d all must pig-pile on one another, and pull her off, and be like, ‘No, we all know one another! We’ve had this dialog earlier than!’”
Pearson does marvel if one purpose Antonia’s plotlines had been minimize brief was as a result of that gag felt redundant with the film’s different huge friend-turned-foe plotline. “That might contribute as another excuse why they selected to convey her out of the film,” he says. “Bob was clearly having reminiscence points as an enormous a part of his character.”
Comedian e book tales being what they’re, there’s all the time the possibility Taskmaster might come again in some unspecified time in the future, with a reveal about how she survived that shot to the face: Her extraordinarily high-tech armor is, in spite of everything, a part of her energy set, and we solely see the bullet gap in her masks, not in her head. It appears unlikely that Marvel Studios would hassle with a personality they killed so offhandedly and abruptly — however hey, Guardians of the Galaxy’s Gamora returned from the useless (by way of time-loop shenanigans), and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki has “died” thrice (and have become a cosmic tree as soon as), but he’s nonetheless apparently coming again for Avengers: Doomsday. So it’s all the time doable she might nonetheless present as much as punch Walker within the face just a few extra occasions. He deserves it.
Thunderbolts* is in theaters now.
