If Tony Masters actually showed up and did this, I would stand up and cheer and not feel the least bit embarrassed.
I mean the same thing they did to the Mandarin in Iron Man 3. Just completely undo an entire character and make it into a "Gotcha!" twist that is supposed to be clever because no one saw such a poor use of a character coming.
As a fanboy for Taskie, I can elaborate; he's not quite a Bugs Bunny character, and his mouth got less motor over time, but he's still a cocky as fuck, greedy, usually immoral but sometimes does the right thing bastard who loves making money off of training red shirts and doing merc work. There's a reason he plays off so well with Deadpool in the comics.
I think the movie was very scrapped together. They waited too long to give Black Widow her own movie, and killed her character off, so they had to make a prequel movie that can't change anything about her or add anything that isn't in Infinity War or Endgame.
It's a bad movie because it's a bad movie, not because it came too late or because it wasn't centered on Scarlett Johansson enough.
Im not sure its just bad because its bad. Bad has to have reasons.
I mean critical people, not mean spirited. I wasn't satisfied with Black Widow, but Im not happy about that. I enjoy enjoying things, and I didn't really understand or enjoy this one.
The best part of that review was introducing me to Cate Shortland.
I do like myself a good coffee! In fact, i started a cold brew, and spent thinking about it more than i did about Black Widow movie.
He's famous for playing the husband on handmaid's tale. His name's Alexi, but mostly I think it was just a cross-promotional thing. Disney has been big on pushing the girl power slant to boost ticket sales so it's like "hey look we got the guy from handmaid's tale, the other show lots of women watch!" To my knowledge the character itself was just made up for the movie.
That's genuinely surprising, especially when I'm sure Marvel had some character out there whose name they could have plastered on him.
Apparently the big beefy prisoner who the Red Guardian breaks his hand, is a character. He's a mutant, future Xmen. He's a wearbear.
I don't recall when Black Widow was original teased, but I think there was probably a point in Phase 2 when there was some genuine interest in doing a serious Black Widow movie. It's very possible that some of the first half of the film likely came from an earlier script or something where it would be a serious tentpole movie for scarlett, however I think it kept getting shelved in the scripting process until there was a filming gap and so they just sorta shuffled some ideas together and pooped this out. What I'm getting at is that I don't think a lot of time or energy was spent of giving this one the proper Marvel makeover with the easter eggs and all that. If you pay attention alexis scenes never take place in the context of the larger film. They are much more of an after thought. Same thing with the post credits. There's an actual comics committee of artists and writers from marvel that get input on films like "Like hey thats gonna be a continuity issue, or hey lets put a prowler cameo in spider-man". I don't they had much involvement in this one.
Apparently, the first plans for a ScarJo Black Widow film date back to at least 2010, when Feige was talking about it, but said their focus was on the first Avengers movie at the time. Problem with that is simple, however. For a while, Ike Perlmutter was still involved with the creative side of Marvel Studios, and he was notorious for believing that anything female- or minority-led would not be what audiences wanted. He was personally responsible for it taking so long for a Black Panther or Captain Marvel movie for the same reason.
