No, the Thunderbolts Poster Doesn’t Feature a Massive AI Mistake

With the rise of AI, people are becoming more and more aware of its shortcomings, especially when it comes to marketing materials. Well, the release of the first Thunderbolts poster has a lot of people claiming Marvel Studios messed up, but it’s actually a simple misunderstanding.

When the Thunderbolts poster dropped on social media, it actually received a lot of praise, with fans embracing the non-floating head concept. However, those who went over it with a fine-tooth comb realized something fishy about Lewis Pullman’s character. It appeared as if he had six fingers on his right hand, which led the Internet sharks to enter a feeding frenzy.

The only problem is that Pullman doesn’t have six fingers on the poster; he has five, with the pinkie being bent at a weird angle to make it look like an additional finger is right off-frame. It harkens back to the old blue dress/gold dress debate, where people couldn’t agree on what color garment they were seeing.

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No matter the amount of fingers on the Thunderbolts poster, though, there’s a reason people were so quick to attack Marvel Studios: it’s used AI before. When the Disney+ series Secret Invasion released in 2023, fans were quick to theorize that its intro used AI, and director Ali Selim confirmed as much, telling Polygon that he didn’t “really understand” how it worked but thought it worked with the themes of the series.

“We would talk to them about ideas and themes and words, and then the computer would go off and do something,” Selim said about working with Method Studios on the AI-aided intro. “And then we could change it a little bit by using words, and it would change.”

Thunderbolts isn’t likely to tackle the same issues as Secret Invasion, so using AI for that purpose is probably off the table. And with the backlash Marvel Studios received, one would think it would avoid going back to that well, especially with so many eagle-eyed fans out there.