Red Sparrow, an upcoming thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence, is being thought of as comparable to
Marvel's Black Widow. Both characters are forced into a Russian spy program as girls, and after a couple ballet lessons, they rebel against their masters.
While there are obvious similarities,
Red Sparrow director, Francis Lawrence, has attempted to put an end to these comparisons and explain why they are unfounded. Lawrence recently sat down with ScreenRant to discuss this and explained how he understands the observation but that there’s fundamentally little overlap beyond superficial elements:
There’s people who think it’s very similar to the Black Widow story. This is not pulled from BW, this is pulled from Red Sparrow, you know, it’s just like written by a guy who was in the CIA. It’s like, his references are coming from a very very different place from that. But there’ll always be that. People like to put things in boxes, and I think is a really unique film. This is a thriller, it’s not action, again it’s not gadgety. It’s a hard-R. There’s violence, it’s a bit perverse, it’s suspenseful, a lot of intrigue. It ‘s a very different kind of spy film.
And in reference to the ballet similarity:
Most of the movie takes place after she’s injured. There’s a big sequence up front where we have a big ballet, choreographed piece that we worked quite hard on and Jen did a bunch of training for and we had great dance doubles and all that great stuff. Which is very cool, but no that’s almost right away.
And while he was at it, he also decided to bring up the comparisons with Charlize Theron's recent thriller, Atomic Blonde.
He mentioned noticing the similarities between the movies as soon as the trailer for Atomic Blonde dropped during Red Sparrow's production. The comparisons with Blonde were the shared Eastern European focus and, less tangibly, similar hairstyles, Lawrence is aware of this but feels in every other aspect the movies are totally different.
“some people aren’t that aware of Atomic Blonde that won’t see those comparisons right up front, at least in terms of some of the imagery.”
Scarlett Johansson is rumoured to be meeting up with potential screenwriters soon to discuss Black Widow, which may be on track for a 2020 release. Red Sparrow is due out this March.