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Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers for Thunderbolts*. Reader discretion is advised.
Thunderbolts* brings together a group of antiheroes who were despised far more often than they were loved. That is essentially why the film is resonating with so many people. It shows these damaged people trying to redeem themselves for their pasts. So, it's hardly surprising that someone like Valentina Allegra de Fontaine would use their emotional weakness for her gain. So, with the same thought, she sends them on separate missions, hoping that would lead them to self-destruction. Still, while most of them survive, one doesn't.
Those who have been following updates about Thunderbolts* would have already guessed who before they stepped into the cinema. The speculations were correct: Antonia Dreykov / Taskmaster dies pretty early in the film. However, her early death wasn't a part of an earlier draft, written by the film's co-writer Eric Pearson. In an interview with Polygon, he spoke about Taskmaster's arc being cut short.
“It was decided after my work. When I sat down to watch the first cut, one thing was totally different and shocked the hell out of me, and it was that. Everything else, I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s the movie that I wrote!’ But that decision…”
In the movie, Taskmaster gets killed by Ava / Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who last appeared in Ant-Man and the Wasp. Ava also has had a tragic past, much like the other antiheroes. However, Pearson thought that Antonia's arc might just be the most tragic of them all.
“I mean, everyone in there has suffered a ton of tragedy. But she was kind of the ultimate tragedy. In the old tragedy rankings, she was at the top, and the other, bigger personalities — no one could get out of line, because no one could say ‘I had it worse than you.’”
Pearson also thought Antonia's killer, Ava, had more in common with her, which might have been a part of Antonia's bigger arc.
“Ava, having won her autonomy earlier in the chronology than Taskmaster, was kind of big-sistering her a little bit, in a way of ‘how to break free and be your own person.’”
Why was Taskmaster's arc cut short in Thunderbolts*? Answer explored
The MCU fans now know why Olga Kurylenko was missing from most of the Thunderbolts* promotions. However, it doesn't exactly explain why her arc was cut short after all. When asked by Polygon, Thunderbolts* co-writer Eric Pearson said,
“You’d have to ask [director] Jake Schreier or [Marvel Studios president] Kevin [Feige] or [co-credited screenwriter] Joanna [Calo], maybe. But if I were to guess, it would be to get the reaction that I had as an audience member, like, ‘Whoa, we’re upping the stakes, we’re doing something drastic really fast, and we’re putting everybody on edge.’”
Pearson also pointed out that his script included a gag that was about Taskmaster's memory issues. However, Bob (Lewis Pullman) also has his own memory-related struggles. So, exploring Taskmaster's arc in a similar direction might have made Bob's issues less prominent.
Well, Pearson seems to be on to something with his guesswork, per director Jake Schreier's comments during an interview with Entertainment Weekly. When asked about why Taskmaster dies early in Thunderbolts*, Schreier said,
"The decision to do it when we did it, we went through a lot of different versions of that, and we thought very carefully about it. And it felt like, while it would've been very nice — and Olga is a wonderful actress — to have her on the team for longer, that death would've kind of reverberated a lot harder and made it harder to find our tonal balance if it had happened later in the film."
He further added,
"And it would've occupied such a kind of more emotional space that would've stepped on what we really need to be building. And we have so little narrative real estate to do it, which is the connection between Yelena and Bob [Lewis Pullman], and the movie is really going to hinge on that. And so in order to keep our tone and to build that team together, it actually felt best, even if it feels a little cold-blooded, to have that happen early."
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