Marvel Studios hosted a lengthy (some might say excruciatingly so) cast reveal for Avengers: Doomsday earlier today, with the actors who will appear in the massive MCU event movie confirmed via a line-up of director's chairs with their names on the back.
The list of characters contained a few surprises (we don't think anyone was expecting that many X-Men), but several major players were also conspicuous by their absence, including the likes of Spider-Man (Tom Holland), Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), and the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen).
We found out earlier tonight that more names will be unveiled at some point, but it's hard to escape the feeling that one omission, in particular, confirmed a popular fan-theory relating to a certain Thunderbolts* character.
Possible spoilers follow.
So yeah, it looks like Taskmaster is definitely brown bread.
Olga Kurylenko's villain-turned-hero didn't feature quite as prominently as her teammates in teasers for the movie, and the recent Super Bowl trailer made it abundantly clear that the Black Widow baddie is not going to appear in a number of key scenes.
The most obvious explanation for this is that Antonia Dreykov is going to be killed-off at some point before the final act.
The fact that every other Thunderbolts* character - including Lewis Pullman's "Bob" - aside from Taskmaster is set to return for Doomsday wouldn't seem to leave much room for many other possibilities, but why spoil a main character death like this, even one so many fans had predicted? Couldn't Marvel have just added Kurylenko's name to throw people off track?
We obviously don't know for sure that Taskmaster will die in Thunderbolts*, but it's hard to think of another reason why she wouldn't be included here. Who knows, maybe Marvel decided to save her for the next big cast reveal just to mess with fans?
You can check out today's full Doomsday cast list along with the announcement video below.
• Paul Rudd as Ant-Man
• Simu Liu as Shang-Chi
• Tom Hiddleston as Loki
• Lewis Pullman as Sentry
• Florence Pugh as Yelena
• Danny Ramirez as Falcon
• Ian McKellen as Magneto
• Sebastian Stan as Bucky
• Winston Duke as M’Baku
• Chris Hemsworth as Thor
• Kelsey Grammer as Beast
• James Marsden as Cyclops
• Channing Tatum as Gambit
• Wyatt Russell as U.S. Agent
• Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm
• Rebecca Romijn as Mystique
• Patrick Stewart as Professor X
• Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler
• Letitia Wright as Black Panther
• Tenoch Huerta Mejia as Namor
• Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards
• Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost
• Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm
• David Harbour as Red Guardian
• Robert Downey Jr as Doctor Doom
• Ebon Moss-Bachrach as The Thing
• Anthony Mackie as Captain America