It turns out there were a lot of interesting little nuggets in the original story for “Thunderbolts*” that didn’t make the final cut. Besides Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) making it out alive and becoming best buds with Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), another side story involved a bit more exposure to the team’s individual shame rooms, brought to life through the incredible powers of The Sentry (Lewis Pullman). While we get a good look at the insecurities and past trauma of Bob, Yelena (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), director Jake Schreier revealed that considerations were made to spend time with the likes of the Red Guardian/Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan).
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“I was very sad not to get to see Alexei’s shame room,” Schreier confessed to Variety. However, the director admitted that spending time with other people would’ve distracted from the primary focus and troubled foe that the team was facing with Bob’s darker half, the Void. “We had Alexei in the gulag, I think, having been thrown in there. I believe Ghost’s was about her time in the orphanage, and being this girl that no one wanted to be around — to be able to be invisible and see the way that you’re perceived, and no one wanting to associate with you felt very sad.” In the case of Bucky, however, earlier drafts of the script may have thrown a curveball that fans didn’t expect, with a moment predating even his time as the Winter Soldier.
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Bucky’s shame would’ve been in his childhood years
While the film spends a beat confirming that all of their team had their own personal traumas brought to life, Bucky casually brushes off the experience, which gets a darkly funny laugh given that we have a solid understanding of what Cap’s old pal would’ve experienced – or so we thought.
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A trip back through his blood-soaked past seems like an obvious choice, but Schreier revealed that it wasn’t the route they originally intended to take with the character. Instead, co-writer Joanna Calo thought about returning to Bucky’s childhood.
“We had a lot of different Bucky ones,” explained the “Thunderbolts*” director. “We always wanted to do something a little less than the expected idea. There’s some very obvious things for Bucky, but I think at one point, Joanna had written something around some shameful moment in Boy Scout camp. But I don’t know that that would have really been the right path for it.” Being unable to finalize the idea, Schreier thought to scrap it entirely, trimming it down to a perfectly handled punchline, instead.
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While we might’ve missed out on this occasion, every reunion we have with Bucky is more time spent with a character whose popularity grows with every appearance, and his future becomes as intriguing as his past. We just have to see where his future leads us when Stan reprises his role as New Avengers’ member, Bucky Barnes when “Avengers: Doomsday” arrives in theaters on May 1, 2026.