Back in 2022, when director Jake Schreier was working on “Beef,” which would go on to become a critical darling and win eight Emmys, he had an afterschool project – pitching on a new Marvel Studios movie.
The process was prolonged – by Schreier’s own account it took six or seven months. Each month or so he would meet with Marvel Studios producer Brian Chapek and discuss the project some more. “I would check in and we’d have a new conversation. And I just tried every time to just come with something new and really imagine, If I were already working on it, what are the things we would start doing?”
Sometimes, Schreier would bring in a “a set of concept art for some of the locations that we had discussed,” another time it was storyboards for some key sequences “not only to show how I would shoot it, but also this concept that we were talking about, that the movie needed a sense of tension, and that the action scenes themselves needed to be rooted in this idea that these are people who can’t trust each other.”
Schreier also made a reel of clips from other movies “about characters thrown together that don’t trust each other but need to learn to work together” – he had the scene from “Toy Story 3,” following the betrayal by Lotso, of the characters in the incinerator, plus moments from “Reservoir Dogs,” “Ronin,” “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” and John Hughes’ “The Breakfast Club.” “It wasn’t that our movie should be these movies. It’s that there are scenes in these movies that feel the way the scenes in this movie should feel, where there is an actual sense of tension and doubt about how this is all going to work out,” Schreier said.
And while it might not have been clear at the time, it’s easy to see these influences on the film that Schreier ultimately made – “Thunderbolts*,” where a bunch of mismatched, morally ambiguous Marvel characters (among them Florence Pugh’s assassin Yelena, David Harbour’s Soviet super-soldier Red Guardian and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, a freshman congressman who spent much of his life as a Nazi-adjacent Manchurian Candidate) are thrown together and forced to figure out how to work together, for the greater good.
In “Thunderbolts*,” the fate of the world depends on them getting over their bullshit.
The pitching process sounds grueling but for Schreier, he didn’t see it that way. He was working on “Beef,” a time-intensive (he directed six of the 10 episodes) project that he was also super passionate about. He didn’t know how many other filmmakers were pitching their take on “Thunderbolts*” and he had fun discussing the project with Marvel Studios brass. “You could talk about what you think would be good, and if that fit with what they were looking for, then great,” Schreier said. “And if it didn’t, then that was going to be OK.”
Not that all of his ideas were roundly embraced. On the second meeting with Marvel Studios, Schreier pitched the inclusion of Man-Thing, a monstrous character that first appeared in “Savage Tales” #1 way back in 1971. At the time, Marvel Studios had already earmarked the character for their “Werewolf by Night” Halloween special, which they couldn’t tell Schreier but he felt just the same. A new draft, completed shortly after, introduced Bob aka Sentry (eventually played by Lewis Pullman), a “rich and interesting” character that totally changed the trajectory of the project. “I never thought about Man-Thing again,” Schreier said. “There was so many avenues to go down. That felt like the team was locked at that point.”
Once Schreier got the job, there was still plenty of work to do, particularly on the script, which was originally by Eric Pearson, a Marvel Studios power player who started out working on the studio’s now defunct short film projects, before contributing to everything from “Agent Carter” to “Black Widow.” Schreier recruited “Beef” creator Lee Sung Jin, who Schreier said wrote “multiple drafts” of the screenplay. “It was about bringing a lot of that tone that we explored in ‘Beef’ and feeling like that could work on an even larger scale,” Schreier explained. “He really believed in this idea that you could explore darker, internal issues and that these ideas are not niche anymore, that those are really universal things that everyone experienced.” When Lee (who Schreier called “Sonny”) got pulled into the second season of “Beef,” Schreier turned to Joanna Calo, another trusted “Beef” confederate and the co-showrunner of FX’s beloved “The Bear.” With Calo, Schreier said, “We just kept pushing that character development, to make those internal ideas work as well as the external ones.”
You can feel that desire within “Thunderbolts*” to do something different – more character-focused, more textured, definitely darker (one young child dies in a flashback, another gets voided by a malevolent inverse of Bob’s sunny Sentry). It is arguably the most emotionally honest Marvel movie ever. It was something Schreier was keenly aware of. “The thing that we were very protective of is, if we were going to make a story that touched on some of these ideas, but obviously is in a summer blockbuster, the last thing that we would ever want is to make it feel reductive or preachy, or make it seem simple,” Schreier said. “That’s really where our focus went.” He said that while they went back and forth sometimes on how intense some moments should be, that there was never a version of the movie that was R-rated, like last summer’s “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
When it came to action sequences, Schreier said that he talked with his collaborators about “willing to trade a certain amount of kineticism for clarity.” He points to a sequence early in the movie when the various characters are trapped in an underground vault and “every character is pursuing a different character within the scene.” A simple solution, to give the moment a little bit of energy, would be to go handheld, but Schreier’s cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo pushed for a different approach – to be “prescribed in our angles.” They both went to stunt rehearsals and shot the “stunt viz” (pre-visualization but with actual stunt performers) on their iPhone, with references for what lenses they’d actually use on set.
“That whole sequence was shot and edited by us before we ever got there on the day and then we had our editors on set with us and we were cutting every shot in as we went, because clarity was so important to a sequence like that,” Schreier said. “We really wanted to check ourselves along the way and get it right.” And get it right they did.
“Thunderbolts*” reflects Schreier’s sensibilities through and through, including that asterisk, which was his idea. It points to a much larger idea – and a completely different title – and it’s something that Schreier was shocked hasn’t been revealed yet. “I think we might want it to leak at this point,” Schreier joked. This, too, came from one of his pitch meetings in 2022. He said, “Hey, we should do one Instagram post where we put an asterisk on the title and then say until we come up with something better.” Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and co-president Louis D’Esposito loved the idea. The studio “ran with it much more than I was expecting,” Schreier said. He wondered if they could actually introduce the new title in the movie’s main-on-end title sequence and asked his bosses if this was possible. “Again, to my surprise, they didn’t laugh me off the call and they embraced that and thought it was a fun thing to do,” Schreier said. “It might be the only place you could do something like that, where there’s enough attention on the movies that you’re not worried about taking whatever the marketing spend is and then switch the title. In this world it seems like a risk you could take.”
Another risk? Marketing the movie, which reportedly has a budget between $150 and $200 million, like an A24 movie, which is exactly what they did with their wonderful, winking “absolute cinema” spot. The promo, set to French producer Gesaffelstein’s thundering “Opr,” highlights things like the movie being “From the cinematographer of ‘The Green Knight’” and “the writers and director of ‘Beef,’” was actually another one of Schreier’s ideas. The filmmaker made the trailer with his assistant on set “as a funny joke we could do something with.” The movie was full of A24 alumni. And the vibe of the movie was left-of-center of most Marvel Studios productions. He sent to Feige, who forwarded it to Asad Ayaz, the studio’s head of marketing. “And they really ran with it,” Schreier said. “What’s fun about it is that it’s a joke. We’re not making it up, but it was meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek.”
As for what Schreier does in the future, he’s up for anything. He’s back in the world of “Beef,” working on the show’s second season (with an all-new cast) and says that the most important thing to him is to “work on interesting things with incredible collaborators.”
“I feel so lucky to have gotten to work with Florence Pugh and Julie Louis Dreyfus and the rest of this cast,” Schreier said. “I think I’m much more focused on finding ways to keep working with people that you really care about and who understand you, and get to make interesting things with them. And I would do that at any scale.”
Still, Schreier said, “I would love to come back here and work in this world.” But hopefully it won’t take him so long to pitch on the sequel.
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