Midway through the latest trailer for Thunderbolts*, CIA chief Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (aka Julia Louis-Dreyfus for the civilians) welcomes the titular team into her headquarters. “The place wasn’t cheap, but it’s got good optics,” she quips.
She’s not kidding. We first saw that place in 2012’s The Avengers, a movie that’s filled with hero shots. In the final one, which is set to Alan Silvestri’s rousing theme, we see Stark Tower, a monument to Tony’s hubris and individualism, rechristened Avengers Tower, a symbol of what can happen when different personalities come together for the greater good. And even though the team traded the building for a compound by the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Avengers Tower still looms large in the public mind. For that reason, Marvel has been cagey about the fate of the Tower after Avengers: Endgame, with the studio refusing to give details about the current occupant.
Thanks to the trailer, we finally know for certain that Valentina (or, more accurately, the U.S. government) bought Avengers Tower. But we still don’t know why. The rest of the trailer consists mostly of footage we’ve seen before, plus a full Bucky action sequence in which he takes down an armored convoy pursuing the team before attacking his (eventual) teammates.
However, one additional beat does stand out. Late in the trailer, Bucky (Sebastian Stan) and David Harbour‘s Red Guardian bicker about the name of their team. “We can’t call ourselves that,” says an exasperated Bucky, but his Russian friend is undeterred. “The Thunderbolts! It’s a cool name.”
