‘Thunderbolts*’ Director Jake Schreier on Backlash to Taskmaster’s Fate and That A24-Inspired Trailer

Director Jake Schreier has a major Marvel film under his belt, but he’s still not quite sure what to call it.

In the final scene of “Thunderbolts*,” it was finally revealed that the title’s asterisk stands for “The New Avengers,” the group that Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Red Guardian (David Harbour), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and Sentry (Lewis Pullman) reluctantly form, at the behest of the scheming Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).

On the film’s opening weekend, billboards and posters on sites like Fandango were quickly updated to show off the new title – a detail Schreier loves, even if his brain still thinks of the film by its original name.

“In my head, I still think ‘Thunderbolts,’ just because we lived with it for so long. I pushed for and was excited about the switch and the flip of it. But we spent three years on the thing, and we didn’t even put ‘New Avengers’ into the scripts on the day that it was said, just to keep it a secret,” he tells Variety shortly after the film’s July 1 release on digital (It comes to 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on July 29). “I hope that it kind of lives as both. We’ve got a lot of punctuation: an asterisk, a backslash, whatever you need.”

Below, Schreier unpacks Taskmaster’s controversial fate, the film’s arthouse-inspired marketing and shares his thoughts on its theatrical run.

Was there ever a version of the movie where Taskmaster stuck around for longer?

Yeah, I think Olga has spoken about that. It was something that happened after the strike, when we were redeveloping the script. I know that there are people that have reached out to let me know that they’re displeased with this, and I totally understand that. It’s not something we did lightly.

As we looked at the script and tried to do a new version, it was a little bloodless. In order to honor these characters and what they do, being contract killers … to have that movie take place with no one showing what that means didn’t really feel like it would land with as much impact. We considered all versions of it.

Obviously, I think Olga is a wonderful actress. It’s a hard thing to do. It’s just showing that, for these characters, this is a thing that’s done, and they feel that all of their lives don’t have a ton of value.

In the film’s marketing, Marvel touted that it featured several acclaimed creatives who’d worked on A24 films. How did you feel about that trailer?

It’s a bit of a joke, but also true. That just came from a joke that I made on set, because my friends that had worked on A24 things were on set with us. As a joke, my assistant and I made this fake trailer, set to that song, and then Kevin [Feige, Marvel Studios president] happened to love it, and sent it to the marketing people. Then they made an actual trailer out of it.

I didn’t expect it to go that far, and it is meant to be at least a little bit winking in its approach, but look all those people! I think the nice thing about the joke is that it is very rare that you get to talk about your crew on these things, like in trailers. Some of my friends were new to this world, and all of them work so hard and care so much, and it was nice, even if it was in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way, to get to speak about the other people that work on these movies.

Now that the film is on digital and being watched by home viewers, how have you reflected on its box office performance in theaters?

For me, it’s so strange trying to grasp how many people watch these things. It was really fun to go around to audience screenings. You can’t even take for granted that you’re going to get a theatrical release, so to be part of a movie that goes out there — and it really is about the theatrical experience — and people can share it and talk about it and say what they think, whether they liked it or didn’t, and then have that continue, it’s nice to be part of a movie that gets to have that life.

This interview has been edited and condensed.