Originally Black Widow was supposed to kick off the MCU’s Phase Four with a familiar face and the proven Avengers’ charm that every single Marvel movie from the past decade manages to cast upon millions of people all over the world. It was on Scarlett Johansson’s star power to finally reap the benefits of spending so much time joining other heroes’ solo adventures with varying degrees of importance in the MCU’s grand scheme for things.
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Nevertheless, fate would have it be different and Marvel’s Phase Four got off to an excellent start thanks to its newfound streaming superpowers that put movie theaters on the back burner for a while, and it all came with the studio being forced to literally flip its planned schedule from what was originally intended, as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Wandavision, and Loki were supposed to come after Black Widow not before it.
No longer was Natasha Romanoff bringing the MCU back, now it was Wanda Maximoff’s turn. As if the Scarlet Witch’s reveal wasn’t enough, two new men donning the Captain America shield came by, and with Falcon and the Winter Soldier doing slightly better than Wanda’s sitcom-themed television as far as ratings, mass appeal, and marketability are concerned, it’s Black Widow who now looks out of her depth versus the others. And that’s without accounting for Tom Hiddlestone’s charm as Loki.
Although it was certainly the smart business move, this left Black Widow in a bit of a pickle behind enemy lines. Unlike the two MCU shows, an in-depth look at Natasha Romanoff isn’t as exciting because -at first glance- it simply doesn’t offer the same kind of potential to set up storylines that will last for the next three years or so due to it taking place in the past, and weirdly enough also after every Marvel fan saw her die in Avengers: Endgame.
Black Widow is supposed to be set just right after the events of Captain America: Civil War, but it will be the best scenario the MCU has given Natasha to explore her upbringing and her complicated nature as a formerly brainwashed spy. Quite frankly, it’s long overdue for the MCU to give one of its few female heroes the chance to lead her own film since the only other heroine to be given that honor was the almighty Captain Marvel, while Black Widow was always left relatively unexplored.
To be fair, Natasha Romanoff, Sam Wilson, and Loki were all second fiddle characters to bigger heroes, but the biggest difference between them and Black Widow is that the first two got completely new and upgraded identities that solidify their place in the MCU; meanwhile, the latter was already a villain in the first Avengers movie, consistently ranks highly for fans whenever they’re asked who their favorite characters are, and that’s all without considering the powerful nature of his new TVA gig in which Loki will literally define and fix the fate of the many Marvel timelines.
Regardless of any Marvel film being popular enough to get people excited over it, Black Widow has been put in an uncomfortable spot within the MCU’s storytelling and, most importantly, in the real world. As box office numbers continue to struggle, Black Widow represents the finest product the studio can offer viewers right now as part of Marvel’s movie theater initiative to drive fans back to cinemas, but only until Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, and Spider-Man: No Way Home come at full throttle towards the end of the year when vaccination will have certainly improved conditions in public gatherings for moviegoers even more.
The first two also happen to be entirely new and exciting Marvel films, exactly the kind of thing bound to get MCU fans excited about its movies again; whereas Spider-Man is quite simply the absolute Marvel king and the most popular superhero on the planet, two things that Black Widow cannot hope to compete with.
Of course, with the kind of careful planning the MCU goes through it’s almost impossible to imagine Kevin Fiege tossing Black Widow out there just for kicks. Maybe Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova could start paving her way into the rest of the MCU; or maybe Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine does show up in the movie to reveal exactly what kind of plan she’s been cooking over the past 5 years.
If that’s the case, it won’t change the fact that Marvel’s signature female hero for the last decade was dealt an extremely unfortunate hand of cards. Black Widow is running on a $200m budget standard number for the MCU nowadays, but expectations should be tamed for the studio as any opening act that suddenly becomes the main summer headliner has to perform with the weight of the audience expectations and hype who are about to see something much different than they had originally planned.
On the other hand, no one was betting on Black Panther to become the only solo superhero to compete with the fully assembled Avengers, so maybe Black Widow and Taskmaster pull off the same kind of magic to become Marvel’s next unlikely winner.
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