You’re never really gone from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Case in point: Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow performs the ultimate sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame, then finally gets her own solo movie (a prequel) months later. This can make things confusing when you are trying to watch the Marvel movies in order. But narratively speaking, these references and homages to classic MCU characters can continue to live on in future movies and television shows. Just because a character is “off the board” for screenwriters doesn’t mean they can’t figure out different ways to bring them back up.
Here’s a recent example. There’s a tribute to Black Widow found in the season finale of the Disney+ show She-Hulk. But it might not have been obvious unless you were thinking back to the hero’s original appearance as an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Iron Man 2. During a recent press day surrounding the finale of She-Hulk, we spoke with director Kat Coiro, who remembered working in a Widow homage during an important scene in the show.
The answer is going to reveal some spoilers for She-Hulk, so stop reading now if you somehow made it this far down and still don’t want to know what happens in the show’s finale.
Kat Coiro told CinemaBlend:
One little Easter egg that I’m really proud of that someone just reminded me of is when we go into the, right before the inner sanctum (of K.E.V.I.N.), there’s that hallway fight with the security guards. I developed that to be an homage to Black Widow. If you look at it, a lot of the shots are really similar. That’s one of our first big female action hero’s action sequences, and so I wanted to throw that in there.
The scene that Kat Coiro is referring to happens near the end of Iron Man 2, where Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) encounter a hallway full of guards at HAMMER Industries. While Happy gets caught up with one guard, Widow takes out a full team, using a fight technique for which Johansson has a funny nickname. It looks like this:
There are so many meta references in She-Hulk, a comedic sitcom that had our main character (played by Tatiana Maslany) breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly, and making Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) do the “Walk of Shame” after a hookup. We don’t yet know if She-Hulk is going to receive a second season, but seeing how the creative team behind the scenes reconfigured your typical MCU series, we can only imagine all of the places the next story could go. I mean, Hulk had one hell of a reveal in the finale, and that probably needs to be explored further, right?
