Thunderbolts* (2025): Cast, Plot and Ending Explained

Thunderbolts* (2025) ends with Yelena and her team surviving a citywide crisis caused by Bob, and with Valentina presenting them to the world as the New Avengers. Everything below gives away the story.

The film opens with Yelena destroying a lab in Kuala Lumpur on Valentina's orders. It is part of a clean up of a secret program run by the O.X.E. Group. Valentina then sends Yelena, Walker, Ava and Antonia to a vault, expecting them to kill one another. Ava kills Antonia, and the others find Bob, an amnesiac man who has just been released from a suspended animation pod.

Valentina's plan is to present Bob to the public as a heroic super being called Sentry. The group is captured, then freed by Alexei, the father figure in Yelena's life, and Walker gives the group its name, the Thunderbolts. Congressman Bucky Barnes takes the team in to testify against Valentina, and they all sneak into the Watchtower, the former Avengers Tower.

Bob joins Valentina as Sentry and spares the team, but then turns on her. Mel uses a kill switch to knock him out, and that frees his dark alter ego, the Void. The Void swallows New York City in darkness. Yelena walks into the dark, finds Bob, and the team faces his trauma with him. By showing him that they accept him, they help him overcome the Void.

Valentina then takes credit and introduces the team to the world as the New Avengers. Yelena tells her that the team now owns her.

The ending of Thunderbolts* (2025) means that the Avengers name now belongs to a damaged, improvised team instead of a polished one, and that the film's real climax is an act of acceptance, not a punch. The darkness lifts, Bob survives, and the team stands beside him. Valentina immediately tries to spin events by presenting the group as the New Avengers, and Yelena answers that the team now controls her.

In my opinion, the smartest choice is how the Void is beaten. The Void swallows New York City, a city the saga has already put through the Battle of New York in The Avengers (2012), and a bigger blast would have been the expected answer. Instead, Yelena walks into the dark and the team tells Bob he is accepted, which lets him overcome his alter ego. It could be argued that this works because the Void is Bob's own dark alter ego, so the cure has to be personal. Compare the finales of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, which are won by force and sacrifice on a huge canvas; here the stakes are huge but the solution is a conversation.

The Valentina exchange is the other half. She wants a hero brand she can steer, and Yelena's line tells her that the leash now runs the other way. Perhaps the quiet joke is that a team of former tools of the state becomes the public face of the Avengers by accident. Most of that team grew up in the margins of other films: Yelena and Alexei in Black Widow (2021), where the Red Room under Dreykov shaped their family, Antonia as Taskmaster, and Bucky across the Captain America films. Seeing them become the headline act is a pay off those films quietly set up.

There is also a production reason it lands. The third act was staged on a full-scale recreation of New York's 45th Street built in Atlanta, according to Time Out, so the characters physically stand in a street rather than against a green screen, and the emotional beat of the team walking toward Bob reads as intimate. The post credit scene picks the thread up directly, with the New Avengers dealing with a trademark lawsuit from Sam Wilson over the name.

Thunderbolts* (2025) has a post credit scene set about a year after the main story, and it does two things. First, the New Avengers and Bob talk about a trademark lawsuit from Sam Wilson over the Avengers name. That connects the film to Sam Wilson as Captain America, the lead of Captain America: Brave New World, released earlier in 2025.

Second, the Watchtower picks up an unidentified spacecraft marked with a Fantastic Four style emblem. The next Marvel Studios release, The Fantastic 4: First Steps, arrived on July 25, 2025, less than three months after Thunderbolts* (2025).