For nearly as long as she’s been in the MCU, fans have been asking for a Black Widow solo movie and now she is getting one. As part of its San Diego Comic-Con presentation, Marvel Studios officially announced Black Widow, which will be the first film to kick off Phase 4. We’ll have to wait until 2020 to find out what exactly the Black Widow movie will be, but actress Scarlett Johansson has revealed three awesome movies that inspired the solo flick. She said:
It's pretty gritty, but it's also surprising...it's kind of in its own genre, I think. Some of the movies that we talked about, we talked about The Fugitive, we talked about Logan, we talked about Terminator 2.
Wow, those are some really good answers. If you’re looking for inspiration or stuff to emulate, you really couldn’t do much better than those three titles. The Fugitive, Logan and Terminator 2 are three very different films, but what they have in common is that they are all very good movies that each excel in different areas that Black Widow will hopefully excel in as well.
The Fugitive is a 1993 film by Andrew Davis and stars Harrison Ford as a man wrongly convicted for the murder of his wife and on the run to find the real killer. The Best Picture nominee is a true action thriller that is propulsive, incredibly intense and filled with intrigue. If Black Widow can capture that level of tension and intrigue, it will really excel in its spy elements.
Logan needs no introduction to comic book movie fans, as the 2017 James Mangold sendoff for Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is a pillar of the genre and full of brutal action, but also deep and affecting character moments. Like Logan, Black Widow will be a solo film, and that should give it an opportunity to dive into who Natasha Romanoff is as a person and we can learn more about her than in any of her other MCU appearances.
That is really exciting given Scarlett Johansson’s brilliant performance in Avengers: Endgame. Logan is also known as being a bloody, R-rated film, and while Black Widow won’t be R-rated, the fact that Scarlett Johansson described it as gritty implies that the team may have a very visceral style of action in mind for the film.
Lastly, James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day is, simply put, one of the best action movies ever. So if you’re going to make an action movie, that’s a great goal to strive for. We are used to action in MCU movies, but presumably Black Widow won’t have aliens and spaceships and will instead be a bit more grounded, with the kind of gun battles, chases and explosions we saw in T2.
Scarlett Johansson isn’t necessarily saying that Black Widow will be exactly like The Fugitive, Logan and T2, or an amalgamation of the three, but the fact that they inspired the solo film in some way and came up in conversation is pretty exciting.
I think a lot of us have presumed that Black Widow will be a spy thriller, with the closest comparison being Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but what she told MTV News paints an even more compelling picture of what the film will be. Calling it gritty, surprising and a film that doesn’t neatly fit into any one genre indicates that we could be in store for something really fun and unique with Black Widow.
Phase 4 kicks off when Black Widow opens in theaters on May 1, 2020. Check out our guide to see when all of the Phase 4 movies will arrive, and head on over to our release schedule to prep for the non-Marvel movies still heading to theaters this year.
