Thunderbolts*

Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, CIA director facing impeachment, sends four of her expendable operatives — Yelena Belova, John Walker, Ghost (Ava Starr), and Taskmaster — to a facility to unknowingly kill each other and erase evidence of Project Sentry.

Where each of them came from, and how they met her:

On Bucky being a congressman: the film shows him already in office and never dramatises the campaign.

He was pardoned after FATWS, is a public war hero with a hundred-year history, and ran on it. Treat the mechanism as unexplained.

Why don't they kill each other? They work out very fast that they've all been handed the same job — Yelena is sent to eliminate a target, and so are Walker and Ghost. They realise mid-fight that the "target" is each other and that the vault is a sealed incinerator. Self-preservation forces cooperation; what keeps them together afterwards is Yelena and Bob.

They survive. They find Bob Reynolds, a test subject with functionally unlimited power and severe depression, whose despair manifests as a reality-consuming entity called the Void. Alexei Shostakov rescues them and names them the Thunderbolts, after Yelena's childhood football team that never won a game. Bucky Barnes, now a congressman, joins the investigation.

The Void engulfs New York. The team defeats it not by fighting but by physically holding Bob and refusing to leave — the whole thematic argument of the film is that the answer to that kind of emptiness is other people. Yelena is the first person in the film to treat him as a person rather than an asset, and that's what it turns on.

Three different "Voids", none related, since the word keeps recurring: the deep space Loki falls into off the Bifröst in Thor (2011); the junkyard at the end of time where the TVA dumps pruned timelines, guarded by Alioth (Loki, Deadpool & Wolverine); and this one, the shadow manifestation of Bob's depression — a psychological entity, not a place.

Cornered, Valentina stages a press conference and rebrands them as the New Avengers, taking public credit. They play along. Yelena tells her: "We own you now." The on-screen title changes from Thunderbolts* to The New Avengers.

Post-credits, fourteen months later, they operate from the rebranded Avengers Tower — "the Watchtower" — arguing with Sam Wilson over trademark rights to the Avengers name, when a distress signal arrives from an extradimensional craft marked with a 4.