It wasn’t until 2019, nine years after her on-screen debut, that Natasha was allowed to stand under her own spotlight when plans to develop a Black Widow film were revealed at San Diego Comic-Con. Even her reasoning for joining the Avengers was because her friend, Clint Barton, was put under Loki’s thrall in the 2012 film.Īs a result, knowledge of who Romanoff is without a man fighting beside her is limited, ranging from a line about a battle in Budapest in The Avengers to a nightmarish flashback to her time spent at the Soviet brainwashing facility the Red Room in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. She was the sexy and mysterious “ very expensive sexual harassment lawsuit” threat that kept Tony Stark on his toes in Iron Man 2 and the close friend and confidante that Steve Rogers could rely on while fighting the nefarious HYDRA in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Since her first appearance in 2010’s Iron Man 2, the story of the Russian spy-turned-first female Avenger has been exclusively tied to the successes of her male superhero counterparts. It was another time, and I think we can all agree on that,” she said to a pool of journalists during a set visit to Pinewood Studios in 2019. “This movie would’ve been so different if we had made it 10 years ago. In an unexpected way, Scarlett Johansson is “thankful” that it took almost a decade for Marvel Studios to give her character, Natasha Romanoff, her own solo film.

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