Intriguing MCU Possibility

I will admit that, at the outset, I was skeptical of the whole concept of the Marvel Cinematic Universe working. The individual films might hit or miss as dependent on the particular writers, directors, cast, etc. but a joint film invited a lot of potential problems as it would "force" various individuals together who might not work together well. One of the problems you used to hear a lot about with large cast movies woulld be that there was always at least one person perpetually gunning for the spotlight, and was more interested in making themselves look good than helping to produce a good finished product. It was rare when movies like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World worked because it was in spite of the cast, not because of it.

But to the studio's credit, the MCU has been working incredibly well for close to two decades now. Some movies have clearly been better than others, and a lot is still dependent on the particular writers, directors, cast, etc. but even their "flops" still brought in hundreds of millions of dollars. And one of the next movies on deck is Thunderbolts* (I think the asterik is officially part of the name) which dropped a new poster and trailer this week.

Now, I was a fan of the comic when Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley introduced the team back in the late 1990s. What I liked about it was not simply the "villains acting like heroes" angle but the "villains preteding to be heroes to further an evil plot but then come to realize they actually like being heroes" angle. Not only did it set them apart from a concept like Suicide Squad but the characters' changing motivations became more intrinsically generated rather than being simply superficially self-serving. There's more dimensionality to the characters when they start thinking, "Hey, I'm getting more out of life emotionally than the basic financial motivations I had been living by previously." I grew less interested in the comic when that core concept was dropped in the early 2000s.

So when Marvel Studios announced a Thunderbolts movie and started driving towards a cast with characters that never especially grabbed me, and explicitly making it more Suicide Squad-esque with Valentina Allegra de Fontaine filling in as the Amanda Waller character, I was ready to dismiss it pretty much out of hand. However the trailer did add in a new (to me) element that could offer some really interesting possibilities, depending on how they handle it. Or, rather, him.

There's a character name-dropped in the trailer as simply "Bob" and a quick Google check reveals the character to be Bob Reynolds, the Sentry. The Sentry, largely a Superman analogue from a power set standpoint, was introduced in 2000 but he was given a backstory that went back to the Golen Age of comics, pre-dating the Fantastic Four. Part of the original concept was that part of his 'final' victory over The Void was that, in order to truely safeguard the universe, Sentry had to wipe his and The Void's entire existence from everyone's minds, meaning that no one -- not even Sentry himself -- could remember them. What was especially clever, I thought, was that the Marvel creators behind him -- Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee -- as well as Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada developed a real world backstory about how he was created by Stan Lee and "Artie Rosen," and the character had been forgotten. They even got Lee himself to do interviews in which he played up his famously bad memory and said he had totally forgotten working on Rosen on the character. (Rosen never existed. The name is borrowed from classic Marvel letterers Artie Simek and Sam Rosen, which is why it sounds familiar, and John Romita Sr. did the 'original' design sketches in a Golden Age style.)

So now with Sentry in the Thunderbolts*, I am intrigued. The character, at least from what we see in the trailer, seems to have no memory of being a superhero. Coupled with his apparent anonymity (Yelena asks who he is), that plays into the notion that he is being introduced, like his comic book counterpart, in an environment where he has already mind-wiped everyone. What could make for some interesting storytelling with this, if they follow some of the basic ideas from the character's introduction, is if Sentry is in fact shown to have been part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe this entire time, being just off-screen in many of the now-classic shots. What if, for example, they flashback to that scene from The Avengers right after "That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry" and the camera pans around the assembled heroes in a circle... but the shot continues on for an additional few seconds and we see Sentry float down from above to join them? What if during the airport battle in Civil War Sentry is in the background saving airplanes that are getting damaged mid-flight from some of the battle's flying debris? What if we see a different angle in Endgame after Falcon's "On your left" and there's Sentry among the army of heroes?

Admittedly, that type of thing might not appeal to a mass audience. One of the things I historically enjoyed about Marvel was the archeology of it and how all these disaparate -- sometimes even contradictory -- stories could work together, despite sometimes being written decades apart. If that kind of thing is dropped into the MCU, would that be something most casual movie-watchers would even recognize, much less care about? I have no idea. But the possibility of it being there certainly has my attention as something that could be more creatively unique than yet another attempt to make a Suicide Squad movie.

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