15 surprising facts you didn’t know about Black Widow

Natasha is much older in the comics

Age has never been an important factor on the Avengers team, and while Marvel’s film franchise never specifies how old Natasha is in the MCU, it does seem to have changed that detail about the character — or at least put off telling fans if it aligns with her age in the comics.

Despite never revealing most of its heroes’ ages outright, the MCU does give some indication of Black Widow’s during Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The film shows a birthdate of 1984 for the character, meaning she’d be in her thirties for the majority of the movies that have come out.

The Daily Dot is right, however, in pointing out that this doesn’t line up with her history as a KGB spy. With the Soviet Union dissolving in the early ’90s, Natasha would probably have been too young to be involved. While no one would put it past the Red Room to send six and seven-year-olds into war, it seems unlikely Natasha would have built the skill set she has in such a short amount of time.

The comics get around the details of Natasha’s timeline in a number of ways, making her much older than she appears. As Comic Book Resources points out, time travel and biochemical serums serve as plot devices that allow Natasha’s comic counterpart to age without physically aging. It’s possible the MCU will use similar reasoning to explain away some of the holes in Natasha’s timeline — if it bothers to address them at all.

Whatever the film franchise decides to do with Natasha’s age and backstory, her comics counterpart is nearly 100 years old. For her to be born in Stalingrad when it was part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, her birthdate must fall somewhere in the early 1900s.