WARNING: There are Thunderbolts* spoilers ahead! The original plan was for John Walker — a.k.a. U.S. Agent — to be the main villain of Thunderbolts*, according to writer Eric Pearson. In that scenario, Walker would have been similar to Thaddeus Ross in Captain America: Brave New World — a human time-bomb powered by Super Soldier Serum rather than gamma radiation. Pearson told ScreenRant that this version of the movie was “fun,” but it didn’t strike the tone he was looking for. He felt that adding in Bob Reynolds unlocked the story he was really looking for, though many of the ideas were already in place even before that.
“The original drafts of this had John Walker as the punching villain at the end,” Pearson explained. “The idea was that part of Val’s manipulation was that she had told him that his serum was wearing off, and she was doing these medications to keep him going. In reality, he was a time bomb; a Hulk kind of thing. There was going to be a bit of a ‘Sun’s getting real low’ moment because from the beginning of this, it was like, ‘I want to end our third act fight with a hug.’”
Searching for that emotional impact is what pushed Pearson away from Walker and led him to Bob. He explained his thought process blow by blow, saying, “I had already kind of layered in the whole Breakfast Club thing, so I was like, ‘I want someone that they can’t beat in a punching fight and that they have to connect to in an emotional way.’ But back in the Marvel Writers program that I did in 2010 or 2011, I’d read the Sentry comics. In the comics, it’s like the golden God of Good vs. Pure Evil. But I was like, ‘What if it’s heroic ambition and self-esteem versus self-loathing and depression and loneliness?’”
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“He’s basically the entire journey for our heroes rolled into one entity. So, I put him in, and he fit so perfectly,” Pearson went on. “Then it was all about finding and defining the Void space and stuff like that.” In the same interview, Pearson shed some light on Bob’s memory repression in the MCU, as compared to his split personalities in the comics. He compared the movie version of Sentry to the way Baron Zemo was adapted to the big screen.
“The story in the comics is that the Sentry has so much power and is so great… He existed since the Golden Age and then realized he was a threat, so he erased his memory from everyone. It’s such a fun comic book idea that’s not going to translate into this movie very well, but you want to take as many elements as you can. We took the memory loss, the duality of his character, and the fact that he was an experiment gone wrong. You want to just take as much to honor the comics, and then fit it into the movie world in the best way. And I take a lot of pride in that because it’s a hard thing to do and figure out the right way, so it doesn’t seem forced.”
This insight into the writing process is interesting to consider when looking ahead at Sentry’s significance to the Multiverse Saga — and the possibilities for John Walker in the future as well. Thunderbolts* is in theaters now.
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