Thunderbolts Almost Included the Team’s Own Darkest ‘Rooms’ and Bucky’s Was a Proper Nightmare

There’s a lot to think about in terms of what to keep and let go of in a film to keep it just around the right length. We later got to know that everyone bowed to a dead Tony Stark (except for Doctor Strange) in one scene from Avengers: Endgame that didn’t make the final cut. Thunderbolts was no exception to this. Jason Schreier, the film’s director, was talking to Variety about this and told them that there were ‘Shame Rooms’ for Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Bucky (Sebastian Stan) too. Bucky’s could’ve been from an unexpected memory that makes it more nightmarish than his Winter Soldier days. He said:

We had a lot of different Bucky ones. We always wanted to do something a little less than the expected idea. There’s some very obvious things for Bucky, but I think at one point, Joanna had written something around some shameful moment in Boy Scout camp. But I don’t know that that would have really been the right path for it.

Adding something about when he was almost a myth among the MCU characters wouldn’t have made sense either, given he wasn’t ‘Bucky’ during this time. It was only until his best friend, Captain Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), pulled him out of that river at the end of Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014) that he came back as the soldier he once served alongside Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011).

What are Shame Rooms in Thunderbolts?

You see, Bob (Lewis Pullman), aka Sentry and Void, is something like Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and can send anyone into a mental dimension when he touches anyone, though he doesn’t do that intentionally. The difference here is, Wanda made her victim live their fear, and with Bob, ‘victims’ are sent into living their traumas from the past. When they are in this certain memory, they are labeled by the Thunderbolts‘ creators as ‘Shame Rooms.’ The film had those for Yelena (Florence Pugh), U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Bob in it already.

And now that we have seen what the plans were for Bucky in there, Ghost and Red Guardian were a part of this too. For them, Schreier says:

We had Alexei in the gulag, I think, having been thrown in there. I believe Ghost’s was about her time in the orphanage, and being this girl that no one wanted to be around — to be able to be invisible and see the way that you’re perceived and no one wanting to associate with you felt very sad.

This would certainly have added depth to the story of our New Avengers. However, the movie is already out and up and running, making waves at the box office, so we can only hope that we will see them released separately in the future. The film, as we write this, had garnered $162 million in the international box office on day one, making it one of the biggest openings in the MCU already.

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