Something very bad is going to happen to Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) between the events of “Captain America: Brave New World” and those of “Thunderbolts*.” We don’t know what that bad thing is going to be exaclty, but we know it will happen because, judging by all the trailers released so far for the later movie, Bucky is not a congressman.
If you’ve seen “Brave New World,” then you know Stan makes a cameo as Bucky. Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) is in surgery after being wounded and Bucky shows up to offer Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) some moral support and words of wisdom. He’s also running for Congress, and we’re led to believe his chances at winning are pretty good. One character actually refers to him as the “future” congressman.
Now there’s the trailers we’ve seen for “Thunderbolts*.” Among other things we’ve seen him in a battle with armed vehicles on a desert road, crashing through an office building in a truck with Red Guardian (David Harbour), and – in a very Peter Griffin move – knocking out someone in a chicken suit.
Do any of these things seem like what you would find a congressman doing?
In fact, in the trailers we see Bucky in a congressional hearing but he’s in the audience, as opposed to being one of the congresspeople Val (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is addressing.
So, in most likelihood, we’re going to learn in “Thunderbolts” that even though in “Brave New World” he’s running for Congress and people are talking about him like it’s in the bag, Bucky’s going to lose the race. And if you literally help save the world from an alien warlord and you still can’t win a congressional race, that probably means something very bad happened during the campaign.
One possibility? The video footage of Bucky as the Winter Soldier murdering Tony Stark’s parents (which we saw in “Captain America: Civil War”) leaks to the press. Is it already public knowledge that Bucky was a brainwashed assassin? Maybe. But it’s one thing to know someone was an assassin, and it’s another thing entirely to actually witness him killing someone.
Whatever it is that ends Bucky’s political ambitions, we’ll likely find out when “Thunderbolts*” hits theaters on May 2.
