Summary
Although Lewis Pullman’s Robert “Bob” Reynolds/Sentryrocks a comic-accurate look inThunderbolts*,his eventual reveal as the all-powerful being isn’t. And it’s the fault of Spider-Man—Spider-Man: No Way Home,precisely.
Sentry—alongside his dangerous alter-ego, The Void—is marketed as the major villain to be tackled by theThunderbolts, a mish-mash team of antiheroes that includes Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, Hannah John-Kamen’s Ava Starr and Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster. Pullman’s portrayal of the character’s mental journey contributed to the film’s 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (among the highest-rated movies in the MCU), and A- on CinemaScore.Thunderbolts*debuted with $74 million domesticallyacross a three-day weekend (actual figures from the following Monday), in line with the projections for $70-$75 million.
Spider-Man: No Way HomeRenders Any Attempt At Recreating Sentry’s Comic-Accurate Origin Redundant
Jon Watts Has Already Employed A Tool That Would Have Been Useful For TheThunderbolts*Plot
Speaking toMarvel.com, director Jake Schreier noted that he and Pullman’s iteration of Sentry is heavily influenced by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee’sSentry (2000) #1, the comic that introduced the character to the Marvel realm. However, unlike that story which revealed Rob Reynolds as a long-forgotten powerful being who, with the help of Doctor Strange and Reed Richards, erased himself from memory—including his own—to protect the world from The Void, the same couldn’t be replicated in the MCU reason being that a similar memory-erasure storyline had already been used by Jon Watts inSpider-Man: No Way Home.
Obviously, we couldn’t tell that same story because ofSpider-Man: No Way Home… Thanks, Jon.
A little context here: in the 2019 Spider-Man threequel, Peter Parker’s identity is revealed, forcing him to enlistDoctor Strange to erase all public memory of Spider-Man to protect his loved ones. Instead of plying this route,Thunderbolts*opts for a recent superhuman that learns to wield his powers and transforms into Sentry on-screen, complete with his suit and a pep talk by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.
Thunderbolts*also subtly rewrites another aspect of Sentry’s origin: his powers. In the comic, a schizophrenic Reynolds gains his god-like powers by breaking into a lab and ingesting a serum from Project Sentry, a top-secret attempt to recreate (and surpass) the Super Soldier Serum. In the MCU, however, Bob is depicted as a deeply isolated, trauma-ridden individual—the lone survivor of a series of failed volunteer experiments under the same project.
So much of the meta of the movie is trying to create a Super Hero…I thought, ‘Well, that’s what [Marvel] does.’ So, in that scene where Bob is learning to use his powers and they’re building a suit behind him, all of that stuff comes from our actual costume department. And there’s a 3D printer from [property master] Russell Bobbitt. We’re doing the same thing that Val is doing in the movie, so that was our little nod to the meta idea of how we represent superheroes.
Bob’s mental journey may be one of the aspects ofThunderbolts*beloved by viewers, a comic-accurate introduction would arguably have worked better, regardless ofSpider-Man: No Way Home. The idea of a forgotten hero forced to battle his alter ego, who makes a mess of any good he tries to do, is far deeper than just another “learning to use powers” origin story. Imagine the MCU faithful’s surprise when they learn that before the Avengers, there was a hero the world loved and knew. Besides, it ties his story to characters like Tilda Swinton’s The Ancient One/Sorcerer Supreme.
