If you were around at the turn of the Millennium, you couldn’t get away from doom-laden news pieces about the horrendous toll the Y2K bug would take on our civilization. Airplanes would fall from the sky. Bank accounts would zero themselves. Medical devices would immediately be disabled. We would enter a new technological dark age, with humanity ending up slaves under the rule of childish, egotistical madmen. Well, that didn’t come to pass (or did it?), with many thinking Y2K was just a lot of fuss about nothing. But what if the only reason the world wasn’t plunged into chaos was because of a 16-year-old Black Widow?
That’s the current rumor doing the rounds about the upcoming solo movie for the character, which may be set in the tail end of the 1990s. This would neatly fit with Marvel Studios’ current pre-occupation with the decade, with the opening scenes of Black Panther taking place in 1992 and the upcoming Captain Marvel taking place in the mid-90s. Black Widow would round out this little trip to the past quite nicely, giving us some insight into what was going on before Tony Stark revealed himself as Iron Man in 2008.
If true, it’ll be interesting to see what they claim Y2K is. In the real world, it was a problem with 1970s computer code saving memory by encoding the year as two rather than four digits, so when you roll over from 99 to 00, the computer will assume it’s in 1900 and be very confused. The character carrying out tech support in an IT department doesn’t sound particularly thrilling, so no doubt it’ll be jazzed up a bit.
One other obvious thing is that Scarlett Johansson is 33 and it’d be a bit awkward for her to play a 16-year-old. But given the advances made in the technology which you can see in the Captain Marvel trailer with a young Nick Fury, they should be able to pull it off for an entire movie.
Personally, I reckon going back in time for a Black Widow film is pretty sensible, as it skips over having to explain where in the tangled Avengers timeline this spinoff is (keeping up with her ever-changing hairdos is difficult enough), but is Y2K really that exciting? Let us know in the comments section down below.
