Hollywood’s investment in female-led action and superhero films is an embarrassingly recent phenomenon. I wouldn’t have been able to have conversations with my director and see it actually translate onscreen.” “And I’m like, ‘It couldn’t!’ It was a different climate.

When we spoke in March 2020, just before the pandemic would delay the movie’s release by more than a year, she said she’d frequently been asked why it hadn’t been made a decade ago.

( WandaVision writer Jac Schaeffer gets a story credit on Black Widow.) Now, Johansson’s an executive producer on Black Widow. She helped improve Natasha with each film, even though no female screenwriters wrote for the character until now. Over the years, Johansson fought to develop her into a fully realized human being. The character’s reinvention owes much to the woman who originated the role. Critics agree, praising the well-crafted caper for giving an unsung hero her due. There have been efforts at female team-up action films before ( Birds of Prey, Terminator: Dark Fate), but rarely executed so well. Watching it ahead of its release, I found myself fantasizing about a woman-led Bond or Mission: Impossible. It’s also a terrific film, a taut and tense spy thriller populated largely by female heroes and villains. After suffering countless indignities in nine preceding films-written as a seductress, an ogled object, a love interest, a self-described “monster” due to her infertility-Black Widow now headlines a movie that grapples directly with the very things that once oppressed her: sexism, objectification, even human trafficking.ĭirected by Cate Shortland-the first solo female director of an MCU film- Black Widow makes a radical new female-dominated action space suddenly seem possible. Now, 11 years after she first appeared onscreen, the MCU’s first major female character is finally getting her own movie.īlack Widow, due July 9 in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access, is a repudiation of the character’s retrograde origin story.

It took 17 movies for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to introduce a female villain (Cate Blanchett in 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok) and 21 to debut a solo female lead (Brie Larson in 2019’s Captain Marvel). And it was a different Hollywood, and certainly a different Marvel: for 10 years, more white men named Chris headlined Marvel movies than women and actors of color combined.

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