Yesterday during the Super Bowl, Marvel gave us another solid look at Thunderboltsthe final movie to bow out the current phase of the MCU, as we prepare to take some fantastic First Steps just a few months later. But while the trailer largely covered re-introducing us to its rag-tag team just like our first big look did, it threw in some very interesting looks at just what those would-be-heroes are up against… and it’s not great.
While Marvel’s still largely tip-toeing around the fact, it was already pretty much a given that Lewis Pullman’s “Bob” in Thunderbolts was in fact Robert Reynolds, aka Marvel’s most famous answer to Superman in the comics, Sentry. We barely got to see Bob in the first trailer, and we see him even less in the new trailer. Well, sort of. Because while we don’t see much of Bob himself as the man who will become Sentry in the trailer, we do see a lot of, well, a Superman-esque figure causing a whole lot of chaos and carnage.
And they are in fact one and the same.
Enter the Void
Robert Reynolds gains his superhuman powers as a teenager, when he steals a vial of an experimental strain of the Super Soldier Serum—one born from historical research by a fractured pan-nation coalition of scientists in the wake of Captain America’s appearance in World War II. Granting him vast powers of enhanced strength and speed, flight, invulnerability, and more, Robert’s ailing mental health also reacted to his transformation, immediately subsuming him in a malevolent persona that that would become known only as the Void. Capable of wielding all of Robert’s newfound powers but with a depraved malice that lifted his restraints, the Void was countered in Robert’s mind by the creation of a heroic persona, one that he would eventually manifest as Sentry.
The Void persisted as a violent aspect of Robert in his mind, emerging out of his control and without his true knowledge—believing for many years that the Void was a separate person and Sentry’s archvillain nemesis—to grimly balance the scales of his career as Sentry. For every life that Robert saved as Sentry, the Void aspired to take one in turn, and it would take years of investigation before Robert realized that Sentry and Void were two sides of the same coin. At the conclusion of his debut Marvel Knights miniseries, after the Void had slaughtered a million people in Manhattan, Robert worked with Mr. Fantastic and Doctor Strange on a plan to end the Void’s grip on him: by erasing not just Robert’s memory of his powers and time as Sentry, but the entire world’s, the Void would no longer have need to manifest as a dark foil to Sentry’s actions, seemingly eliminating the two altogether.
In the years since as Robert has returned on and off as Sentry, so has the Void, with Robert also occasionally still believing that the Void is a separate entity beyond his manifestation within him, and has tried and failed to either outright destroy or separate the Void several times. It would take, again, a sacrifice on Robert’s part to seemingly vanquish the Void entirely, albeit an unintentional one: when Sentry died in the 2020 event King in Black—torn to shreds by the titular villain, Knull—the Void remained as a lingering entity, choosing to submit to Knull and be absorbed by him entirely. When Knull himself was beaten by Eddie Brock at the climax of the event, the Void, entirely subsumed by Knull, seemingly died with him.
The Void’s Powers, Explained
As the same person, the Void essentially has all of Robert’s powers as Sentry as well as the compulsion to use them for evil. But as we see in the new Thunderbolts trailer, he does actually have several unique abilities that spin out of them. The Void uses Robert’s ability to manipulate matter and energy to not only shapeshift his form, but also project clouds and tendrils of dark matter, like the one we see enveloping New York in the film. Void’s “tendrils” themselves can also fluctuate in power, either being able to simply ensnare and subdue opponents, or in their most focused form, cause atomic cancellation in a person’s body—disintegrating them entirely as the field sustaining their atomic and subatomic particles is dissipated. We seem to see some form of that in the new trailer, when Void “flattens” several fleeing civilians into black smears.
Although mostly bonded to Sentry, Void can possess other hosts beyond Robert, too, just as he did when he became part of Knull after Robert’s own death. Which means when the Thunderbolts go up against him this May, not even killing poor Bob outright might be able to stop one of the Marvel Comics universe’s deadliest threats.
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