Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow has become one of the central pillars of the MCU. Since her debut in Iron Man 2, she’s spent the last eight years kicking a serious amount of ass across the Avengers and Captain America movies, and that’s despite having no superpowers (and not even a fancy bow and arrow). If anyone deserves a solo movie, it’s her, so the news that Marvel Studios has pencilled one in for a May 1st, 2020 release is music to our ears.
That’s according to perennial leak-mongers That Hashtag Show. Along with a bevy of information about what else is on the studio’s 2020 slate, they also dished up some particulars of what the Widow film will consist of, offering up the following synopsis:
At birth the Black Widow (aka Natasha Romanova) is given to the KGB, which grooms her to become its ultimate operative. When the U.S.S.R. breaks up, the government tries to kill her as the action moves to present-day New York, where she is a freelance operative. The standalone film will find Romanoff living in the United States 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Given that the Soviet Union fell in 1991, this puts the year the movie’s set as 2006. According to the ever-useful MCU wiki, that was a pretty quiet year, with the only superhero action a couple of sightings of the Hulk. In fact, it was so quiet that the Lion King musical transferring theaters and the release of Microsoft’s ill-fated Zune are deemed worthy of mention. This should give Marvel a pretty clean canvas to work from and a few characters they could easily squeeze into the plot. For one, I’d imagine we’ll see Nick Fury in action, and perhaps Black Widow‘s first encounter with Hawkeye.
If this synopsis does prove to be true though, it sadly puts the kibosh on the rumors that the movie’s plot would be about stopping the Y2k bug. That’s a shame, as I felt that story had some potential, but I can understand that they might not want to do too many 1990s-set films in a row.