‘Thunderbolts*’ Director Jake Schreier Talks ‘The Suicide Squad’ and ‘The Expendables’ Differences: “It had this twist on that.”

The Thunderbolts* are now in theaters and the film is doing good. The fans and critics are satisfied and the box office numbers are solid, so there is a good chance that the movie will do great in the end and that it will be a brilliant innuendo for the upcoming Fantastic Four movie.

The film has been met with a of hype, but there were also some criticisms before the premiere. One of these “criticisms” was a potentially unfavorable comparison with The Suicide Squad, directed by James Gunn, and the action franchise The Expendables.

In a recent talk with the press, director Jake Schreier addressed this aspect and revealed how Thunderbolts* compares to these two movies.

During the interview, Schreier was asked to respond to the claims that fans “might look at Thunderbolts* as Marvel’s version of the Suicide Squad or even The Expendables”. When you look at it, it does have a similar premise. A group of villains/antiheroes is assembled to do a potentially fatal task. That is the basic premise of all these movies.

But, Schreier thinks that it’s not an issue per se. We have to warn you, there will be some spoilers from the movie after this point, so be careful how you approach the text.

“Well, that was what was so smart about Eric Pearson’s script, and what Brian Chapek had developed with him, was that it had this twist on that,” he began. “From the beginning, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine is sending them to kill each other, not to be some kind of rogue team to do black ops with.”

And while this might sound similar, Schreier thinks otherwise. “So, right from the get-go, I felt like that distinguished it, and then it felt like we could make our mark by going into a much more internal character place, make it more about internal struggles than external ones, and find some level of difference there,” he said.

“I also think that for me – relative to – James [Gunn] did such incredible work with Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad, that it felt like those were really this incredible group of misfits and that this group felt more like people who might’ve thought they were the hero, or they were the lead – people like John Walker – and then things went quite awry,” he continued. “So, it’s more about just all of us. Anyone who’s kind of thought that they were destined for something bigger then had it not work out and what do you do from there? Where do you go, and how do you find your way out of that place?”

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