Black Widow is looking to be a very important outing for Marvel Studios. Along with being the first chapter in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’ll also finally give Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff the solo movie that fans have been waiting to see for almost a decade now.
What’s funny about it though is that it’s only coming after Nat was killed off rather tragically in Avengers: Endgame, with Black Widow set to be a prequel. And while the film’s first trailer teased a more personal and emotional story than the MCU usually gives us, questions still swirl around when, exactly, it’ll take place.
Again, we know that it’ll definitely be a prequel, but the aforementioned trailer didn’t do much to cement its place on the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline. Thankfully, then, producer Kevin Feige has now shed a bit more light on things, confirming that it’s set after Civil War.
“It was about four years ago as we were working on Infinity War and Endgame at the same time, we knew that we wanted to bring her story to a conclusion in the most heroic way possible in Endgame, but also that we wanted to explore a part of her life that we hadn’t seen before,” Feige told IGN during CCXP.
“It occurred to us that we had seen her adventures in the Avengers movies, but a lot of stuff happened in between those movies that we never saw, we didn’t hear about, we didn’t learn about. And [with] that, we wanted to do a movie with Scarlett Johansson because she is Natasha Romanoff and not do a story with a younger Black Widow for the whole film.”
Of course, even with the timeline confirmed, many questions still linger over the Phase 4 opener, most of which have to do with Nat’s Russian “family,” which includes fellow “Black Widows Yelena (Florence Pugh) and Melina (Rachel Weisz) and Red Guardian/Alexei (David Harbour).” Meanwhile, the mysterious Taskmaster is also throwing off a lot of people, with Marvel choosing to keep the villain’s identity a secret for now.
And while the first trailer was certainly well received, it’ll still be interesting to see how Black Widow performs when it shoots its way into theaters next year. After all, it really needs to set the tone for Marvel’s first batch of post-Endgame movies and will hopefully assure fans that even with the Avengers gone, the franchise can still flourish.
