Cate Shortland, the director of Lore and Berlin Syndrome, looks to be the director selected to helm Marvel‘s long-gestating Black Widow movie. The concept of a film built around Natasha Romanoff, the assassin-turned-Avenger, has been in the works for a long time, especially with early criticism that however successful Marvel Studios were, they were giving a lot of its male characters their solo projects (Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Captain America, Ant-Man etc) but ignoring their female characters in that regard. That seems to have been duly noted with The Wasp formally being added to the latest Ant-Man outing, Captain Marvel having just completed filming for a March 2019 release and now the first proper progress on the Black Widow title.
Marvel had said they were interviewing a large number of potential directors (rumoured to be over 70 names on the list) and were particularly interested in getting a female director – the only lady to helm a Marvel project so far is Captain Marvel ‘s Anna Boden (Patty Jenkins was originally down to helm Thor 2 but left the project – ultimately directing a bigger hit with Warner/DC‘s Wonder Woman) . In recent months that list had been reduced to a handful of prominent names with Shortland being confirmed Thursday. It is believed that the project will detail a time in Natasha Romanoff’s life before she joined the Avengers and the first steps on her redemption from being an infamous KGB assassin. Scarlett Johansson – getting some recent mixed press because of yet another casting controversy as a transitioning male in Rub & Tug (again with Ghost in the Shell director Rupert Sanders) before exiting that project on Friday – will reprise the role that she’s played in one shape or form for most of the past decade – and she will also be back for Avengers 4 next May, Thanos’ finger-snap not-withstanding.
