THE SUBSTANCE Director Coralie Fargeat Declined Marvel's Offer To Helm BLACK WIDOW

THE SUBSTANCE Director Coralie Fargeat Declined Marvel's Offer To Helm BLACK WIDOW

A mainstream superhero movie from the director of Revenge and Substance might be hard to picture, but it's now come to light that Coralie Fargeat was in talks to helm 2021's Black Widow...

By MarkCassidy - Jan 30, 2025 08:01 AM EST
Filed Under: Black Widow

When The Substance picked up five Academy Award nominations - including Best Director - during Sunday's announcement, the usual jokes about director Coralie Fargeat immediately getting swept up in the superhero movie vacuum followed.

Now, it's come to light that the filmmaker actually did come close to accepting an offer to helm a Marvel Studios project while she was still working on the script for her surreal body-horror satire.

In Variety's piece on Fargeat's struggle to stay true to her original vision for the film despite certain Universal execs feeling that the extreme gore and nudity would make it a hard sell, it's mentioned that the director walked away from preliminary discussions to helm 2021's Black Widow starring Scarlett Johansson in order to stay focused on The Substance.

“I held on so tightly during the making of the film and the difficult post-production phase, when everyone wanted me to make it less violent, less excessive, less gory, less frontal. I knew that I had written this film to be more than — or at least at the same level as — what I’m denouncing in the film,” Fargeat says, adding that our society is “still insanely violent for women and puts us in boxes” to a point where we “create our own violence against ourselves.”

It may seem difficult to imagine the filmmaker behind The Substance and 2017's brutal survival thriller Revenge taking the helm of a Marvel movie, but the reality is, had Fargeat accepted the offer, Black Widow probably wouldn't have turned out all that different to the film Cate Shortland delivered.

Though some filmmakers (James Gunn, Sam Raimi) have obviously managed to bring their own unique flourishes to previous MCU projects, any level of creative control - which Fargeat insisted on with The Substance - would not have been entertained.

Now that Fargeat is an Oscar-nominated director, is there a chance she will decide to board more mainstream projects in the future? We'd say it's highly unlikely!

Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow, confronts the darker parts of her ledger when a dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past arises. Pursued by a force that will stop at nothing to bring her down, Natasha must deal with her history as a spy, and the broken relationships left in her wake long before she became an Avenger.

Black Widow also stars Florence Pugh, David Harbour, O-T Fagbenle, Olga Kurylenko, William Hurt, Ray Winstone, and Rachel Weisz, and is now streaming on Disney+.

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vectorsigma
vectorsigma - 1/30/2025, 8:30 AM
A career disaster prevented. Feige is contented with lousy directors
ObserverIO
ObserverIO - 1/30/2025, 9:26 AM
@vectorsigma - y'know, except for Jon Favreau, Kenneth Branagh, Joss Whedon, The Russos, James Gunn, Ryan Coogler, Chloe Zhao, Sam Raimi, etc.
Urubrodi
Urubrodi - 1/30/2025, 9:39 AM
@ObserverIO - Exactly. You'd think that for a user that loves James Gunn so much he'd appreciate the fact that without Marvel Gunn would probably not be at DC right now...
MisterBones
MisterBones - 1/30/2025, 8:32 AM
And she made a classic instead. Good for her.
slickrickdesigns
slickrickdesigns - 1/30/2025, 8:47 AM
Good for her… I thought Black Widow was ok. Not in the top ten MCU films but it would’ve done a lot better as an MCU film if it wasn’t during Covid .
theBlackSquare
theBlackSquare - 1/30/2025, 8:55 AM
Good move.


I kinda liked the real family dynamics in the fake family in BW. That had promise. But then it got too aerial and cgi-y.


Plus, Ray Winstone's accent. [frick] me.
Wahhvacado
Wahhvacado - 1/30/2025, 8:55 AM
Man, I would have loved to see her take on how Black Widow gets her vest
bobevanz
bobevanz - 1/30/2025, 9:09 AM
@ItsNotForMeWahh - It would have been the same movie. Directors for Marvel movies have no creative input
bobevanz
bobevanz - 1/30/2025, 9:11 AM
See dodged that bullet. Then Universal wanted her to change the ending of The Substance. She declined, Mubi bought the distribution rights and now it's nominated for 5 Oscars. What a crazy turn of events
TheVisionary25
TheVisionary25 - 1/30/2025, 9:17 AM
It seems dismissive to say that any level of creative control would not have been entertained for her take on Black Widow considering Cate Shortland’s ideas & flourishes like the opening sequence of that film did happen…

?si=_8tkbRs4g6jbSOWs

They may not have gone as violent as perhaps she would have wanted if she had taken on the job given her then previous feature work in Revenge but still , almost all filmmakers that have worked with Marvel have said they value collaboration and are open to their ideas.

Anyway , I haven’t seen her films thus far but would have been interesting to see her version of the Black Widow film…

However, I think it worked out for the best in regards to her aswell as the BW film we got which I liked personally.
Polaris
Polaris - 1/30/2025, 9:29 AM
@TheVisionary25 - The opening sequence was so good!! Best part of the movie imo and one of my fave sequences in the whole mcu.
TheVisionary25
TheVisionary25 - 1/30/2025, 9:33 AM
@Polaris - agreed

I think that and the Table scene are my favorites in the film , the latter of which just goes to the heart of the story.

?si=EKr_XhVU39o9uagv
Cleander
Cleander - 1/30/2025, 9:28 AM
considering how unfinished and thin the story of The Substance is Idk if she would have made Black Widow worse than it already is
ObserverIO
ObserverIO - 1/30/2025, 9:29 AM
The Russos would have made a perfect Black Widow movie.
TheVisionary25
TheVisionary25 - 1/30/2025, 9:58 AM
Fun fact:

Ms Fargeat has worked on a cbm project before…

She directed ep 9 of Netflix’s The Sandman S1 (good episode).

?si=8IhQ0_vmtfajHvUH
MurfDyson
MurfDyson - 1/30/2025, 10:05 AM
That's not a complete loss on her part. Her style sort of fits to what the DCU is building towards
Forthas
Forthas - 1/30/2025, 10:08 AM
This MAYBE explains those early rumors! Thank God Will Smith will not be Neo
https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1884946113519628724?t=vTkOqGXyxl_kiIbnlI9XEg&s=19
ThorArms
ThorArms - 1/30/2025, 11:29 AM
Black Widow was fine. It's simply a decent - mid Marvel film, and that's ok.
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