Marvel’s Secret New Master Villain Revealed?
It may be that Marvel's Thunderbolts villain is secretly Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine controlling the mega-powerful Sentry.
The new Big Bad of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is not Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror or whoever might play Robert Reynolds aka Sentry, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. According to Twitter user and frequent Marvel scooper CanWeGetSomeToast, the upcoming movie Thunderbolts will involve the titular team of rogues facing off against the immensely powerful Sentry, who is actually being manipulated by Valentina’s powerbroker (who is different from the Power Broker). While this has not yet been confirmed by Marvel Studios, it could be an interesting twist for the upcoming Phase Five.
Very little is known of the plot of Thunderbolts thus far, but it was announced at Disney’s D23 event that the Marvel movie would star Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, David Harbour as her kinda-father Red Guardian, Sebastian Stan as the Winter Soldier, Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster, and Wyatt Russell as U.S. Agent. It was later announced that Harrison Ford would be portraying Thunderbolt Ross (taking over for the late William Hurt) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus would be returning as the enigmatic Valentina. Hannah John-Kamen was also announced to come back as Ghost, but we recently reported she had left the Marvel project for unknown reasons.
All of this is to say that we know a lot about who will be on the Thunderbolts team, but we do not yet definitively know which Marvel figure they will be facing off against. The Evil-Superman analog Hyperion has been brought up previously, but the idea the team will be against Sentry and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine in some capacity is a new one. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ previous Marvel appearances have seen her seeming to manipulate both Florence Pugh and Wyatt Russell’s characters into forming a kind of morally ambiguous version of the Avengers, but now it seems she might have more of a purpose than to just have her own superhero team.
Speaking speculatively, it could be that Marvel Studios is taking notes from the original Marvel Comics incarnation of the team, in which it turned out that a new superhero team was actually the Masters of Evil (led by Baron Zemo), masquerading as do-gooders in order to build public trust. It would be interesting if the MCU take on this is that Valentina is working both sides of the equation, creating both the Thunderbolts and Sentry in order to pit them against each other, thus secretly controlling what seems to be an Avengers-level event.
In Marvel Comics, Robert Reynolds was transformed into Sentry by a variant of Captain America’s Super-Soldier Serum (which seems to pop up everywhere), magnified to a level that essentially gives him unlimited cosmic levels of power, though in true comic book fashion, that origin has been retconned and adjusted multiple times since his 2000 debut. Given that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier series (which introduced Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Valentina) already heavily involved altered versions of the Super-Soldier Serum, it feels like the Marvel Cinematic Universe version could stand to do something different. We’ll have to see what Valentina has up her well-tailored sleeve.
