This week the well anticipated movie Thunderbolts came out in the box office. The figure isn’t that far from the $12M chalked up by February’s Captain America: Brave New World; that preview made about 29% of the Anthony Mackie’s pic first Friday, which turned into an $88.8M 3-day. Last night’s money for the movie featuring Florence Pugh, David Harbour, and Sebastian Stan, which is also under that of Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3, which posted $17.5M in previews for a $48.1M on Friday night and $118.4M in the 3-days.

More news on the movie is Disney and Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts is off to a very good start with around $11M tonight, as heard from non-Disney sources. Always know that the forecast can swing higher or lower by the time late night viewers come in on Friday. Many are hoping tonight’s previews will get more people to come and give better days for Thunderbolts.

Also for “Thunderbolts*,” Marvel has thrown so much stuff into its new branding event — an enigmatic asterisk, a guinea pig, a comic villain, a depressed superhero, nepo babies, veterans of David Simon’s “The Wire” — that some of it was bound to stick. The results are fitfully amusing, sometimes touching and resolutely formulaic. The story zigs and zags between firing guns and dropping bodies, and its tone zips all over the place. What holds it more or less together is a cast that includes Florence Pugh getting her Tom Cruise on, David Harbour playing a boisterous Russian clown and Sebastian Stan winking at Donald J. Trump.

Stan, whose last splashy turn was as the young Trump in the biopic “The Apprentice,” is back as Bucky Barnes, whom you may know as the Winter Soldier. This movie’s resident cool dude, Bucky, is a soulful warrior with a prosthetic metal arm who looks good on a motorcycle and is mostly here to provide franchise continuity. Now in Congress, Bucky is working with Wendell Pierce’s Congressman Gary, to bring down the head of the C.I.A., Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, another Marvel returnee). She’s been overseeing a secret program out of a mountain lair worthy of a Bond villain, so, yep, she’s bad news. If you’re not a comic-book devotee and have never heard of the Thunderbolts before they were exhumed for screen service, you aren’t alone. If you want to know more about it go watch in the nearest theater.