‘Thunderbolts’ Delays Filming Until WGA Strike Is Over
Marvel Studios can’t catch a break right now. Even though Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is giving them some hopes of restoring the public’s faith in what they can do, the ongoing WGA strike has caused serious havoc to their production pipeline. Thunderbolts is the latest casualty.
The stoppage was announced on May 2, and a few days later it was reported that Blade would not be going into production by the end of the month as initially planned, as the script wasn’t fully there yet. (Nic Pizzolatto had just been tapped to do some rewrites.) Multiple series were later forced to stop working, from Daredevil: Born Again in New York, after workers refused to cross the picket lines set up in front of the set, to Wonder Man, which suffered a similar fate most recently.
Now, Deadline is reporting that Jake Schreier’s Thunderbolts is no longer moving ahead with production. Cameras were set to start rolling mid-June in Atlanta, but the studio will now wait until the strike is over to do so. Wonder Man will also have to wait for a deal to be reached to resume production in LA.
Marvel Studios has currently four feature films scheduled for 2024. Captain America: New World Order will be the first, and shooting is still ongoing despite the strike — we are getting pictures from the set almost on a daily basis. Most recently, Deadpool 3 started filming in London, though with no on-set writers. The strike might affect this movie more than the New World Order as Ryan Reynolds will have to stick to what was written on the page and not be allowed much improvisation. Shooting in London also means that they don’t have to worry about picket lines, and production should continue as normal if Shawn Levy and his team consider they can move on without the writers.
The Thunderbolts team, as Kevin Feige announced it during D23 in 2022.
But the other two, Thunderbolts and Blade, have pressed pause, and since the strike is not showing any signs of coming to a close anytime soon, it looks like they might have to be moved out of the 2024 schedule. They are currently targeting July 26 and September 6, 2024, dates.
What’s especially interesting about Thunderbolts is that Marvel commissioned a near-page one rewrite a few months ago from Beef creator Lee Sung Jin, but that was thought to be complete, unlike Blade‘s punch-ups. So either they were still not locked in with the script, or they thought they would need a writer on the set, or they even didn’t want to risk anything with the picket lines and decided to wait until it was safe to shoot.
For now, the live-action 2023 schedule for Marvel Studios seems to be in a good place. With Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 now in theaters, the studio is now moving on to promoting Secret Invasion, which debuts its first episode on Disney Plus on June 21. Loki season 2 starts streaming on October 6, and then, on November 10, The Marvels is hitting theaters. Finally, all episodes of Echo will start streaming on November 29. We are also supposed to be getting What If…? season 2 and X-Men ’97 at some point this year, but we have seen very little promotion for it.
Things could get much more complicated over the next few months, though, and for good reason. It’s with these moves that the writers could start turning some heads at the top studio floors and really affecting their income, but it’s certainly not enough yet. Now, the Directors Guild of America is currently renegotiating their deal with the studios, and SAG-AFTRA is also getting ready to sit down with them in early June. The former is ready to join the writers’ war, and the latter has already called for a vote to authorize a strike, so if negotiations fall through with at least one of them, which is looking like a very possible scenario, then all of the above will be rendered obsolete, as the entire industry would be forced to shut down and the situation would be worse than it was in 2020 with the pandemic. Projects filming would not be forced to send their crews home, but also those in pre- and post-production would have to stop if there are no directors involved with them, and/or actors being cast or doing ADR.
Stay tuned for more as this situation continues to develop. For now, we fully stand with the writers and even wish Marvel shuts down more projects just so more headlines like these start circulating and the studios start to feel the pressure.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
