Marvel spent years trying to get a Black Widow movie off the ground and, way back in 2004, filmmaker David Hayter penned a screenplay for a solo project revolving around Natasha Romanoff.
Hayter, who is the voice of Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid franchise, is known for writing movies like X-Men, X2, and Watchmen, and stepped behind the camera to helm Wolves in 2014. Now, he's revealed a "needle drop" moment he had planned for his Black Widow project.
Unfortunately for the movie, it was being developed at a time when Elektra and Catwoman bombed and left Hollywood executives convinced that female-led superhero adaptations couldn't work. That attitude didn't change until Wonder Woman was released in 2017.
As for Natasha, she made her MCU debut in 2010's Iron Man 2 and later headlined her own spin-off during the pandemic.
Back in 2011, Hayter said this about what he had planned for Black Widow and the "painful" truth of why it didn't happen.
"What I tried to do was use the backdrop of the splintered Soviet Empire - a lawless insane asylum with four hundred some odd nuclear missile silos. It was all about loose nukes, and I felt it was very timely and very cool. Unfortunately, as I was coming up on the final draft, a number of female vigilante movies came out. We had Tomb Raider and Kill Bill, which were the ones that worked, but then we had BloodRayne and Ultraviolet and Aeon Flux."
"Aeon Flux didn’t open well, and three days after it opened, the studio said, 'We don’t think it’s time to do this movie.' I accepted their logic in terms of the saturation of the marketplace, but it was pretty painful. I had not only invested a lot of time in that movie, but I had also named my daughter, who was born in that time period Natasha - after the lead character in Black Widow. I named my daughter after a movie that I wasn’t working on anymore."
It was probably for the best that this project fell apart as it's unlikely Marvel Studios would have been able to utilise the character in its movies had the character's film rights been tied up with another studio.
There are many comic book adaptations which fell apart in the early-to-mid 2000s and Black Widow is simply one of many. It's a project Hayter was clearly passionate about, anyway, and we can't help but think it might have been pretty good!