Why Was [Spoilers] Killed Off in Thunderbolts*? Death Explained

Many Marvel fans are wondering why a major character in Thunderbolts* is killed off in the movie. We won’t spoil things in the opening paragraph here, though numerous attentive, eagle-eyed fans had already formed theories of a particular death that was going to happen in the Thunderbolts* (or The New Avengers if we’re going by the recent marketing material). If viewers felt as though the death was shocking or odd, they would be right. As the movie’s director Jake Schreier explains, the character’s death was a late addition to the script. (Warning: Spoilers ahead!)

Thunderbolts* director explains why a shocking death occurs

Schreier has revealed that Taskmaster was killed off in Thunderbolts* to raise the stakes of the other members in the team, namely U.S. Agent, Yelena Belova, and Ghost.

The character’s death is particularly shocking (despite many figuring out that she was likely going to die) since seeing potential heroes die is rare in the MCU, and the way that Ghost effectively kills Taskmaster with a point-blank shot through the mask is cold and unceremonious. Neither Ghost nor Yelena react all that much to her being killed off suddenly either. This is despite the fact that Yelena and her “sister,” Natasha Romanoff, spends a good deal of time trying to cure Taskmaster (and the other “dolls”) of the mind control from her father, General Dreykov, in the 2021 film Black Widow.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Schreier explains that after his team returned to the table once the writer’s strike was over, they thought about how to improve the film and “it really felt like the movie seemed just a little bloodless.” He felt that the audience needed to feel like they “don’t know who’s going to survive” and to make it “clear that it could have been any one of them [who dies].”

As for why Taskmaster dies so early in the film, he says “while it would’ve been nice — and Olga is a wonderful actress — to have her on the team longer, that death would’ve kind of reverberated a lot harder and made it harder to find our tonal balance if it had happened later in the film.”

Narratively, Taskmaster’s death comes in large part due to the agents not realizing quickly enough that they are being set up by their boss, Fontaine. They immediately see the cost of being on so many black-op missions where they are expected not to ask any questions about their targets or the larger picture of what they’re doing. Any one of them could have died just like Taskmaster did, cold and unmourned. It still takes them awhile to figure out how to work together and trust one another, but the film is principally about the importance of connection despite them all being individual badasses.