DVDizzy Forum

We are told that Black Widow is looking to take advantage of the attractive production incentives available by filming in Croatia. Walt Disney Studios used the beautiful coastal nation to film portions of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, allowing for Black Widow to film their as well in keeping with one of many requirements for the handsome rebate. We were the first to bring you a limited synopsis for the film, one that is in line with a longer synopsis also recently revealed:

"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 movies 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."

With production set to begin early in 2019, it’s very possible Black Widow is already in pre-production and we expect casting news to begin to leak before the end of the year!

Plot details are being kept behind the Iron Curtain, but it will be an internationally set story centering on Natasha Romanoff, a spy and assassin who grew up being trained by the KGB before breaking from their grasp and becoming an agent of SHIELD and Avenger. Pugh will play a spy on the same level as Romanoff, likely her moral opposite.

Sotiris wrote:The role went to Florence Pugh instead of Emma Watson.

Lee tells another story more or less verbatim from the documentary, about how he came out to California on business in the late ’70s, decided he wanted to live in paradise, and hatched a scheme — “I’m a schemer” — to make that happen, telling the people at Marvel that for the good of the company he’d be willing to uproot his family and move to Los Angeles to set up the movie division. “I wasn’t coming out to make movies,” he says. “I wanted to live out here!”

I ask him if trying to sell Marvel movies to studios back then was a frustrating experience, if the execs he was pitching didn’t get the potential of these characters. He pivots, says the problem was with the people running Marvel at the time.

He says he had convinced Bo Derek “to play the Black Widow, or one of our characters,” but the Marvel people nixed the project, worried that if the movie bombed it might negatively affect comic sales.

(Derek was actually briefly attached to star in a movie about Dazzler, a mutant superheroine/disco singer introduced in the pages of Uncanny X-Men in 1979; former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter’s account of how the film almost happened is an interesting story that mentions Casablanca Records founder Neil Bogart, Lenny & Squiggy, and Harlan Ellison, but not Stan Lee.)