Right here’s what Taskmaster’s full story was presupposed to be in Thunderbolts* Avid gamers Enviornment

Ever for the reason that first Thunderbolts* trailer got here out, sharp-eyed Marvel Cinematic Universe followers have been theorizing about one specific hole between the forged record and the footage launched. Black Widow villain Antonia Dreykov, aka Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), seems on the film’s poster and advertising and marketing, however is noticeably absent from different scenes and photographs within the promotional materials, resulting in hypothesis that her position within the film is pretty minimal. That wound up being true — although unique Thunderbolts* screenwriter Eric Pearson (Black Widow, Incredible 4: First Steps) tells Polygon he wrote a way more concerned arc for her.

He additionally says he solely discovered how radically her position had been altered when he was sitting in an early screening, watching the film, which “shocked the hell” out of him.

[Ed. note: Significant spoilers ahead about Taskmaster’s situation in Thunderbolts*.]

Black Widow units up Antonia because the cyborg-ized, mind-controlled daughter and supreme weapon of Dreykov (Ray Winstone), the overall behind each the Soviet model of the super-soldier-serum mission that produced Crimson Guardian (David Harbour) and the torturous Crimson Room program that turned Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and her sister Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) into super-assassins. By the top of Black Widow, Dreykov is useless, which leaves Antonia to place her personal super-assassin expertise (and talent to imitate anybody’s combating model) to extra worthwhile work, serving as a mercenary for CIA director and mega-schemer Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).

When Valentina faces impeachment and potential arrest for her many crimes early in Thunderbolts*, she tries to cowl her tracks by sending all her operatives to a high-security vault on the identical time with totally different info and assassination assignments, hoping they’ll wipe one another out. Most of her mercs — Yelena (from Black Widow and Hawkeye), John Walker/US Agent (Wyatt Russell) from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) from Ant Man and The Wasp — all survive the group’s first confrontation. Antonia doesn’t. Ghost weapons her down. There aren’t any shock reveals the place she survived that encounter, not less than not on this film — she seems to die, and shortly after that, to be incinerated.

All of which got here as an entire shock to Pearson. “It was determined after my work,” he advised Polygon. “After I sat down to look at the primary lower, one factor was completely totally different and shocked the hell out of me, and it was that. The whole lot else, I used to be like, ‘Yeah, that’s the film that I wrote!’ However that call…”

So far as why Taskmaster was faraway from the film, Pearson says he doesn’t know: “You’d need to ask [director] Jake Schreier or [Marvel Studios president] Kevin [Feige] or [co-credited screenwriter] Joanna [Calo], perhaps. But when I had been to guess, it might be to get the response that I had as an viewers member, like, ‘Whoa, we’re upping the stakes, we’re doing one thing drastic actually quick, and we’re placing all people on edge.’”

Pearson says that within the last draft of his script, Antonia/Taskmaster survives for your entire film, and was the middle of “a reasonably large subplot.” His script had Taskmaster bonding with Ava, who, as we realized in Ant-Man and the Wasp, gained quantum-shifting powers in a lab accident that killed her mother and father, and was subsequently discovered by SHIELD, raised in a lab, and skilled as a weapon. Pearson felt they’d have rather a lot in widespread “as individuals who’d grown up in labs and been managed that method.

“And Ava, having received her autonomy earlier within the chronology than Taskmaster, was type of big-sistering her a bit of bit, in a method of ‘methods to break away and be your individual particular person,’” Pearson says.

He additionally feels that Taskmaster’s presence helped rein in a number of the different characters’ tendency for self-pity: “I imply, everybody in there has suffered a ton of tragedy,” he says. “However she was type of the final word tragedy. Within the outdated tragedy rankings, she was on the prime, and the opposite, larger personalities — nobody may get out of line, as a result of nobody may say ‘I had it worse than you.’”

His model of Taskmaster additionally enabled a working joke about her tendency to neglect she’d moved previous making an attempt to assassinate John Walker, and go after him once more. “On the comedy aspect, she was struggling along with her personal memory-loss stuff, and there was a gag the place she simply saved restarting the combat and forgetting that that they had made up and grow to be buddies.” he says.

“They’d be discussing the plan of methods to get out [of the vault], and he or she’d simply go after him once more, they usually’d all need to pig-pile on one another, and pull her off, and be like, ‘No, we all know one another! We’ve had this dialog earlier than!’”

Pearson does surprise if one cause Antonia’s plotlines had been lower brief was as a result of that gag felt redundant with the film’s different large friend-turned-foe plotline. “That would contribute as one more reason why they selected to carry her out of the film,” he says. “Bob was clearly having reminiscence points as an enormous a part of his character.”

Comedian ebook tales being what they’re, there’s at all times the prospect Taskmaster may come again in some unspecified time in the future, with a reveal about how she survived that shot to the face: Her extraordinarily high-tech armor is, in any case, a part of her energy set, and we solely see the bullet gap in her masks, not in her head. It appears unlikely that Marvel Studios would trouble with a personality they killed so offhandedly and abruptly — however hey, Guardians of the Galaxy’s Gamora returned from the useless (by way of time-loop shenanigans), and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki has “died” thrice (and have become a cosmic tree as soon as), but he’s nonetheless apparently coming again for Avengers: Doomsday. So it’s at all times potential she may nonetheless present as much as punch Walker within the face a couple of extra occasions. He deserves it.

Thunderbolts* is in theaters now.