Bad news for everyone waiting for Ayo Edebiri to make her MCU debut in 2025’s Thunderbolts: according to a report from Deadline, the star of The Bear and Bottoms has had to drop out of the much-anticipated movie due to scheduling issues — but Marvel Studios already has a replacement lined up.

Edebiri is the second high-profile actor to depart the project in the last few weeks, following Steven Yeun stepping away at the start of January, again for scheduling reasons. While such talk of “schedule issues” is traditionally code for other problems that people don’t want to talk about publicly, in this case, it’s almost guaranteed to be the case, as Thunderbolts has slipped significantly from its originally planned production schedule due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. The film was initially intended to shoot in 2023 between seasons of Edeberi's The Bear. As filming is now resuming on - well, pretty much everything post-strikes, it's possible she's leaving Thunderbolts due to filming of The Bear's third season.

Stepping in to replace Edebiri will be Geraldine Viswanathan, who has previously appeared in TBS’ Miracle Workers and Apple’s The Beanie Bubble. It remains unknown what role Edebiri was, and now Viswanathan is, playing; outside of the pre-existing characters announced for the movie — Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, Sebastian Stan as the Winter Soldier, David Harbour as Red Guardian, Wyatt Russell as US Agent, Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost, Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the Countess Valentina Allegra de Fontaine — other characters anticipated to show up in the movie remain under wraps at this point.

Thunderbolts, which will be directed by Beef’s Jake Schreier, is reportedly going to begin shooting in February. The movie is now scheduled to reach theaters in July 2025. (We have a list of all upcoming Marvel projects right here.)

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