The last few weeks, Marvel’s being going out of its way to promote Thunderbolts as not your average MCU outing. It’s got big-name actors, sure, but they’re from mid-size hits like A Different Man and Midsommar, and creative forces behind Beef, Minari, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Now, it’s telling you it’s a different type of film by hyping up the realness of its stunts.
Y’know that one scene in the trailers of Yelena falling off the Merdeka 118, a skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur? That’s a very real thing Florence Pugh did; in the featurette, she talked about being excited for that particular moment since she first read the script. According to director Jake Schreier, Disney’s health and safety team was understandably hesitant to do this—at 678.2 meters (or 2,227 feet), the Merdeka is the second-tallest building in the world behind the Burj Khalifa—but Schreier felt the film needed something needed “a little more weight and surprise.” What likely helped sell it to Disney was Pugh’s insistence on doing it (she “loooooves heights,” apparently), and “taking it upon herself to elevate it because she trusts our amazing team.” Check it and the official version that’ll open the movie down below.
Now that is a pretty cool bit of stunt work, and you can tell everyone in the production took doing this very seriously. Turns out, that’s not the only real bit of work in the film: the scene where Yelena walks away after the floor of a building explodes is also real. Schreier revealed they shot that hours after breaking down the Merdeka rig. There’ve been a lot of explosions in the MCU over the years, so seeing Thunderbolts get to make that and the Merdeka sequence real is a nice change of pace. It’s an interesting time for this featurette to drop—stunt performers will finally get Oscar recognition in a few years, and Marvel would certainly like wants some Academy gold. If they can’t get wins for acting or Best Picture, technical work like this or VFX may be enough to brag about.
Either way, Thunderbolts* and its many, many stunts hit theaters on May 2.
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