With Black Widow being readily available at no extra cost for Disney Plus subscribers for a few weeks now, it’s safe to say that most people interested in watching the film have done so already. Add that on top of Disney and Scarlett Johansson finally settling their legal dispute, and it’s about time to assess the movie’s legacy and meaning in the MCU.
That is if there is such a thing because, for all the wait that preceded it, Black Widow will probably join Thor: The Dark World and Ant-Man as one of the most forgettable Marvel films so far. Like Ant-Man, Black Widow is not a bad movie, but due to extraordinary circumstances it’s now dethroned the former as marvel's worst performer, and that’s without adding the cost of the Johansson case and its pricey settlement; however, much like Thor’s second outing, it’s a film that fails to do anything spectacular, and when it tries, it fails spectacularly.
Just like her good old friend Clint Barton, Natasha lack superpowers, something that’s often portrayed as a bit of a limitation in the MCU that is not nearly as meaningful as it should be in Black Widow, a film that tries to convince Marvel fans that after Civil War one of the Avengers took down a massive surveillance air fortress and that it all went unnoticed somehow. On the opposite end of that lies The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which purposely places John Walker and Sam Wilson’s plain humanity at the center of the series’ premise.
Funnily enough, Black Widow has a certain self-awareness over the type of movie that it should be and tries to be at certain points because Natasha happens to be a James Bond fan. While it’s fitting for Romanoff to enjoy Moonraker, perhaps the most over-the-top Bond film ever (right up there with Die Another Day), writers would have done well to draw inspiration from other 007 adventures that didn’t feature Roger Moore hunting down the movie’s villain in space, like Daniel Craig's Casino Royale and No Time to Die.
Black Widow was sidelined for years only to finally get her solo movie after the character’s on-screen death in Endgame, yet despite how anticlimactic that is at first glance, it would have also made for the perfect opportunity to step away a bit from the classic Marvel formula without any repercussions. The main reasoning to take this course of action is quite simple, at its heart Black Widow is a highly inconsequential film for the MCU.
With the sole exception of Black Widow’s post-credits scene, which sets up Yelena Belova’s involvement in the Hawkeye series, there is absolutely no reason the movie is a must-watch for anyone interested in the MCU’s Infinity Saga or in the blooming Phase Four.
Sure, there’s plenty of screen time for Florence Pugh to shine as Yelena and she comes off as a very charming and likable character, and the same applies to both Widows’ parents, nevertheless, those elements could have been kept without adding pheromones and a high-flying military fortress housing the lifelong misogyny in Dreykov’s work.
The main problem for Black Widow lies in the movie desperately trying to convince viewers that it’s a Jason Bourne type of movie until it goes full-on Marvel third act towards the end with a massive (albeit entertaining) battle in the sky in which it seems a bit far-fetched for Natasha and Yelena to somehow make it out alive from. All this should be a lesson for future Marvel scripts that aim to fit selected genres inside the MCU, because it would appear that success is found in embracing more of the new foreign element rather than what’s already familiar.
WandaVision, Loki, and Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings are proof of this, especially the latter since it treats viewers to a very Hong Kong feel during the first two-thirds of the movie before tapering off into the usual CGI frenzy that is accustomed, which has been widely considered the weak point in the movie. It’s clear that pulling off these types of new experiments in the MCU is not easy and that Disney Plus lends itself way better to storytelling of this kind than cinema, but between Black Widow and Shang-Chi one clearly tries much more than the other.
The sad thing about Black Widow is that Natasha’s sendoff was a movie that will possibly be remembered more by the real-life controversies regarding its release and finance, instead of becoming a new Marvel classic. What If…? teased Black Widow and Hawkeye with somewhat different leading characters and it’s arguable whether Natasha’s two episodes manage to do a better job than the solo Black Widow movie.
The next legacy Avenger waiting on deck is none other than Clint Barton, whose Hawkeye series might borrow from several action classics with the added bonus of featuring a star who has Bourne Legacy credentials to his name. Hopefully, Hawkeye will honor its protagonist better than Black Widow did for Natasha, after all, in Yelena it’s already bringing over the best thing about Black Widow.