15 surprising facts you didn’t know about Black Widow

Natasha’s solo film almost happened in 2004

Much of the excitement surrounding Marvel’s Black Widow stemmed from the fact that Natasha Romanoff was never given her own solo film alongside the other Avengers. That’s something fans had been calling for, even before Marvel announced she would get her own movie, and it’s also something the studio had considered a long time ago — as early as 2004, in fact.

Four years before Iron Man kickstarted the MCU, Lionsgate actually announced that a Black Widow movie was in the works there. X-Men writer David Hayter was attached to the project, which supposedly would have followed Natasha’s comic storyline far more closely.

Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it — Lionsgate eventually decided not to move forward with the film. According to Hayter, there were too many similar female-led films being made at the time, and none of them was doing particularly well.

For Johansson, waiting until 2019 was beneficial in some ways, even if fans would have liked to see her character in the spotlight earlier. Speaking with Collider, she emphasized how different the film would have been had it been created 10 or 20 years ago:

"“This movie would have been so different if we’d made it 10 years ago. It was a different time. I think we can all agree on that. A lot of people ask me why we didn’t do it before now, but in some ways — I’m sure there’s a lot of reasons for that — in some ways, I’m actually very thankful that it’s happening now because we can actually make a movie that’s about real stuff and audiences want that.”"

Given Marvel’s somewhat slow journey to embracing female-fronted films and shows, fans should probably be grateful Black Widow exists at all. That said, the 2004 project will always leave them wondering, what if…?