Fantastic Four: First Steps may be playing its promos completely straight, but Thunderbolts* seems to be going a more artsy direction with all kinds of memes to cater to terminally online cinephiles. Just in, there’s a new promo for Red Guardian’s Limo Service which may very well be an in-universe ad.
Check this out:
“Red Guardian is here to protect you from boring evening.”
If Yelena Belova is the lead of this film, Red Guardian is no doubt the comic relief. We don’t know what he’s been up to since Black Widow or the blip, but doing a limo service as a failed ‘celebrity’ does seem to track for him.
If anything, RG is one of the best characters to come out of Black Widow, and I’m pretty happy that he’s going to be part of the next Avengers movie. I honestly thought they were just going to kill him off in this film, but it’s possible that they saw a lot of potential for a silly joke machine—and those are the kinds of cogs that the MCU is built on.
Let’s just hope that they manage to take his character even a little seriously from time to time, because there is an earnestness to him that I think gets forgotten because of how funny he is. There’s a reason why Jim Hopper is beloved despite being a cranky old cop in Stranger Things, and that’s because David Harbour delivers when he needs to.
Catch Thunderbolts* when it comes to cinemas on May 2.
