Thunderbolts*: an unused storyboard shows Man-Thing nearly joined the team, before a swamp monster was ruled too distracting (film news).

If the embed above misbehaves, the film’s trailer is also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUUszE29jS0

Whatever knows fear burns at the touch of the Man-Thing. Whatever knows screenwriting, it turns out, finds him rather hard to squeeze into a third act. Storyboard artist Anthony Lee Winn has shared an unused board from Marvel’s Thunderbolts* on Instagram, showing the shambling heap of swamp lined up with the rest of the 2025 film’s misfits. It backs up what director Jake Schreier told SFX magazine around the film’s release: that at one point during pitching he really wanted Man-Thing on the team.

He did not make it, and screenwriter Eric Pearson has explained why. Speaking to ComicBook.com, Pearson said one version cast Man-Thing as an agent, or a piece of evidence, that Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine wanted destroyed, but the creature was simply too unpredictable to fit. The bigger problem was Bob. Lewis Pullman’s damaged everyman needed the audience’s full attention while he worked out he was the most powerful being in existence, and nobody was going to look at him with a walking compost heap in the corner of the frame. As Pearson put it, the film already had one “What the hell is that?” character.

It is a fair point, if a slightly sad one, because Man-Thing has always been one of Marvel’s more interesting oddities. He oozed into Savage Tales #1 in 1971, created by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and Gray Morrow: biochemist Ted Sallis, transformed into a mute vegetable mound in the Florida Everglades, a couple of months ahead of DC’s Swamp Thing turning up in House of Secrets #92. Conway was sharing a flat with Swamp Thing co-creator Len Wein at the time, which must have made for some interesting breakfasts. It was Steve Gerber’s run in the 1970s that turned the character into a cult favourite, making him guardian of the Nexus of All Realities and, in Fear #19, introducing a certain cigar-chomping duck to the Marvel Universe. And no history would be complete without mentioning the comic with the most unfortunate title in publishing, Giant-Size Man-Thing.

On screen he has had less luck. A 2005 film that premiered on the Sci Fi Channel is best left in the bog, and his MCU debut in 2022’s Werewolf by Night, where Michael Giacchino’s black-and-white Halloween special turned him into a gentle giant called Ted, was a highlight that Marvel then did nothing with. The comics have been kinder. He even served on Luke Cage’s version of the Thunderbolts, which is presumably where Schreier got the idea.

With Marvel’s Midnight Universe horror line launching in the comics this month, and no sign of a Werewolf by Night sequel or the long-rumoured Midnight Sons film, Man-Thing remains stuck in the swamp of development limbo. Still, the storyboard is a lovely glimpse of a stranger Thunderbolts*, one in which Florence Pugh’s Yelena has to deliver her best lines to a sentient bog. Somebody at Marvel should give Ted a ring. He will not answer, of course. He has never been much of a talker.