The news that Thunderbolts* would introduce the MCU's take on The Sentry was met with excitement by fans, but also some trepidation. How would Marvel Studios go about adapting one of its most overpowered, complex, and often confounding characters?
*The New Avengers did a superb job of making Robert Reynolds a richly complex and dark character, exploring his mental health problems and putting a fresh spin on The Void that played into The Sentry's struggles.
However, it only really scratched the surface of Bob's potential, and there are still many places he could go in Avengers: Doomsday and beyond.
We recently sat down with the Thunderbolts* director, Jake Schreier, and asked the filmmaker whether he ever considered adapting one of The Void's more monstrous horror-inspired forms from the comics.
While what we saw in the movie was pretty haunting—the villain takes on a shadow-like form—there are examples on the page where The Void is more akin to an H.R. Giger painting. It turns out such a design was considered.
"Yeah, we experimented with everything. It was an exploration process of what that should look like. I think Kevin [Feige] really had pushed us down this road of, 'Can we do something photographic? Is there any non-CG way to do this?' There isn't really, not in a language that would fit with the rest of the film. But we were trying to do something where he was photographed in all the scenes, and with the simplicity to it. He's never CG. There is rotoscoping going on, but it was just trying to think of what's the simplest thing we can do that will contain the most of Lewis's performance, and we'll feel the most of his performance in it?"
There is this sort of now history or pattern of CG that's been used in these movies sometimes, taking a turn and doing something a little simpler can be striking in the lack of the things that you tend to expect from that. But we imagined all of those things, and we referenced all of the elements of the comic books, and there are so many different, amazing ways that he's been portrayed."
"I think in our movie, some of the more monstrous depictions of The Void...we explored some of those, where we would do red eyes. And then all of a sudden, it felt like we had to swing so far in that ending in terms of being able to reach in and care for this person, or rescue them from this place, that it was always that balance of we want this to be scary or spooky. We want it to be striking, but we also don't want it to put it at such a remove that you don't feel that you could go and rescue Bob from within that space."
In the video above, Jake also talks about the emotional scene where the Thunderbolts rally around Bob in The Void, pulling him back from the darkness, and the work that went into creating the sequence where The Sentry lays waste to the movie's heroes.
Thunderbolts* is available on Digital now and will be released on 4K and Blu-ray on July 29.