This week, Marvel Studios is back in theaters with Thunderbolts*, a new film very loosely based on the comic book characters who share the same team name.
The Thunderbolts* movie doesn’t require any foreknowledge about the comics, because the main characters are almost entirely selected from previous MCU projects.
Florence Pugh leads the cast as a former Black Widow, Yelena Belova, and she appears alongside Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes, a role he’s played since 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger. Black Widow‘s David Harbour and Olga Kurylenko are also returning as Red Guardian and Taskmaster, respectively. Ant-Man and the Wasp‘s Hannah John-Kamen is reprising her role as Ghost, while The Falcon and the Winter Soldier‘s Wyatt Russell is stepping back into his role as U.S. Agent.
Thunderbolts* currently has a 90% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is well above the score of several recent Marvel movies. That kind of rating suggests it will do quite well at the box office.
But if you were wondering if you can skip theaters entirely, Watch With Us is ready to answer the question that brought you here.
No. It’s not streaming on either of those platforms. Prior to the launch of Disney+ in 2019, Disney did stream several of its movies on Netflix, including Marvel Studios films. But barring some extraordinary circumstances, that won’t be happening again for any new movies released by Disney.
To date, only a single Marvel movie has been released day-and-date with a theatrical premiere and a Disney+ release. The film in question was Black Widow, and Disney tried that dual release as an experiment during the pandemic in 2021.
The reason why Disney has never repeated that experiment with a Marvel movie is that the simultaneous streaming debut severely hurt Black Widow‘s box office numbers. Scarlett Johansson even sued Disney over the lost revenue from that decision and she ultimately settled with the studio out of court. The entire debacle was a mistake that Disney doesn’t seem eager to repeat.
When Will ‘Thunderbolts’ Be Available to Stream?
Although former Disney CEO Bob Chapek favored shortening the window of time between a film’s release and its streaming debut, the current CEO, Bob Iger, rescinded those changes. Consequently, the wait between a Disney film’s release and its premiere on Disney+ is approximately three-and-a-half months.
Marvel’s most recent movie, Captain America: Brave New World, was released in early February and it has yet to make its Disney+ debut. But it will likely arrive in June. Going by that time frame, Thunderbolts* probably won’t hit Disney+ until the middle of August or early in September.
