Thunderbolts* Ending Explained: The Void, The New Avengers And That Fantastic Four Post-Credits

Short answer: Bob Reynolds loses control and becomes the Void, which spreads across New York turning people into shadows. The team cannot beat him physically, so they go inside his mind instead, find him in the memory he is most ashamed of, and simply stay with him. Yelena reaches him first. The Void recedes because Bob is no longer alone with it, not because anybody won a fight. Valentina Allegra de Fontaine then spins the entire disaster into a public relations victory, presents the team as the world's new premier heroes, and the film's own title card is replaced on screen with The New Avengers.

What actually happened

Thunderbolts* spends its first hour as a competent action film about disposable people and its last act as something Marvel had not previously attempted: a superhero climax with no punching in it.

1. Valentina's black-site programme produced Bob Reynolds, an addict recruited into an experiment that gave him effectively unlimited power. Bob is the Sentry, and the Void is the other half of the same person.
2. Valentina's attempt to erase the loose ends throws Yelena, John Walker, Ava Starr and Bob together, with Alexei and Bucky arriving separately.
3. Bob's power is presented as directly tied to his mental state, which is the film's central mechanic and the reason the finale works the way it does.
4. When the Void takes over, its effect is people vanishing and leaving shadow stains on walls. New York goes dark. Conventional force does nothing at all.
5. The team enters the Void's mental landscape and finds Bob reliving a memory of himself at his worst. Each of them has to walk into their own shame room to get there.
6. Yelena reaches Bob and stays. The others follow. Nobody talks him out of it and nobody defeats him. They hold on.
7. The Void recedes. Bob survives. The city is restored, though the film is careful not to pretend the damage did not happen.

A Marvel film ended its third act with six damaged people standing in a room refusing to leave a suicidal man alone, and it worked.

This is why Thunderbolts* reviewed at 88%, the best of Phase 5, and it is also why the film's commercial performance is worth stating clearly: $382.4 million worldwide against a $180 million budget is a loss. The best-reviewed Marvel film of 2025 lost money. That tension defines Marvel's current position more than any single plot point.

What Valentina does next, and why it matters

The ending's second movement is the more cynical one. Valentina, facing impeachment and an investigation, walks into a press conference and reframes a catastrophe she caused as the debut of a new team. She names them the New Avengers. The film does not present this as a happy ending; it presents it as a group of people with no other options accepting a brand.

The post-credits scene, explained

The stinger jumps fourteen months ahead. The New Avengers are operating publicly out of the Watchtower and are in a legal dispute with Sam Wilson's team over ownership of the Avengers name, which is both funny and precisely the sort of institutional mess the comics' Thunderbolts generate. Then a rift opens in the sky and a spacecraft carrying an unmistakable 4 insignia comes through it.

That is the hand-off to The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which arrived in cinemas in July 2025 and took $519.1 million worldwide, Marvel's biggest film of that year. It confirms the two things fans wanted confirmed: the Fantastic Four exist in a separate universe, and they are coming here.

What it means for the wider story

• The New Avengers exist as a rival institution to Sam Wilson's team, which is unresolved and is a live plot thread going into December.
• The Sentry is now the most powerful being in the MCU's Earth-bound roster, and the film deliberately does not cure him, which is a loaded gun.
• The Watchtower reactivates Avengers Tower as an MCU location for the first time since Age of Ultron.
• The multiverse rift in the post-credits is the first casual, unremarked-on breach in the MCU's sky, which is exactly the escalation the Multiverse Saga needed.

What's next

Avengers: Doomsday on 18 December 2026 is where this all lands, and unusually the connection is confirmed rather than inferred. Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, Lewis Pullman, Hannah John-Kamen and Wyatt Russell are all on Marvel's confirmed Doomsday cast list, alongside the Fantastic Four's Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn, and Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom.

What is not confirmed is how the New Avengers name dispute resolves, whether Bob's Sentry powers are a plot device or a bomb, and whether Valentina survives contact with a film that has thirty other characters in it. Marvel has not commented on any of it.

For the reference-level breakdown of the film, see our Thunderbolts* easter egg guide, and the First Steps ending explained picks up the story that ship is carrying.