A movie centered around the Marvel Comics character Black Widow has been in various stages of development since 2004. 2004! That’s four years before Iron Man kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s pretty funny reading the old press releases knowing what we do now, like when LionsGate announced that “Marvel Enterprises” gave the go-ahead to “develop, produce, and distribute theatrical film releases based upon two popular Marvel properties – Iron Fist and Black Widow.” Black Widow was listed behind this guy. Ouch.
There’s still no Black Widow stand-alone movie, despite Scarlett Johansson having played her since 2010, but there will be soon. A director (Cate Shortland) is attached, the script is being re-written, Johansson and Lady Macbeth‘s Florence Pugh are attached, and now so is David Harbour. The Stranger Things star will play an undisclosed character in the “internationally-set story centering on Natasha Romanoff, a spy and assassin who grew up being trained by the KGB before breaking from their grasp and becoming an agent of SHIELD and Avenger,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. Harbour can also be seen in Hellboy, which comes out April 12. (Fun fact: that film’s director, Neil Marshall, once said that he’d “love to do a Black Widow movie.”)
Also hopping aboard the MCU train is Rachel Weisz, who is expected to join the Black Widow cast. “It’s unknown who Weisz would be playing in the film,” Variety reports, but whoever it is, prepare to be as smitten as Kathryn Hahn.
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It’s taken this long for Black Widow to get her own movie because of the “erroneous notion that audiences did not want to see a female-led hero because of a slew of films 15 years ago that didn’t work,” Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige explained. “And my belief was always that they didn’t work not because they were female-led stories — they didn’t work because they were not particularly good movies.” Black Widow will next appear in Avengers: Endgame.
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)