First reactions to Black Widow have praised the film, but a recurring note is that it feels like the film should have come out years ago. After all, this is a prequel and the character died in Avengers: Endgame. There’s really nowhere else for Natasha Romanov’s story to go except the past, and it’s bizarre that it took until 2021 (or even 2020, when the film was first scheduled) for her to get a solo movie. The MCU introduced Black Widow in 2010’s Iron Man 2, but she really made a splash in 2012’s The Avengers to where it seemed like a solo movie was an inevitability. And then fans waited. And waited some more.

Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige was repeatedly asked about when a Black Widow movie would come along. It took until 2014 for Marvel to say they were even considering a spin-off (keep in mind that 2014 was the year Marvel released Guardians of the Galaxy, a movie with a talking raccoon and a tree that only says, “I am Groot.”), and even in 2016 you were getting wishy-washy statements like Feige saying Marvel was “creatively and emotionally committed” to a Black Widow spinoff.

So what changed? What happened after 2016 that allowed the studio to finally move forward with a Black Widow movie? The likely culprit is the dissolution of the Marvel Studios Creative Committee in 2015. Up until then, movies produced by Marvel were overseen by the head of Marvel Entertainment CEO, Ike Perlmutter. In September 2015, Feige was able to work a restructuring that gave him the creative freedom to report directly to Disney studio chief Alan Horn. Perlmutter still had say over Marvel’s slate of TV series (where creative control was given to Jeph Loeb), but the movies belonged to Feige. The studio quickly moved to greenlight two of their biggest hits, Black Panther and Captain Marvel, and by January 2018, the Black Widow movie had a writer with the studio hiring Cate Shortland to direct in mid-2018. If you look at the Marvel machine as a bunch of moving parts and various projects that need attention, a 2018 start for Black Widow was probably the best they could do considering all the other movies that were in various stages of production.

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Image via Marvel Studios

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“But why did taking power away from Perlmutter and giving it to Feige change things?” For that, you’d have to look at Perlmutter’s opinions on female superheroes and female fans. In 2015, one of the leaked Sony emails revealed an exchange between Perlmutter and former Sony Pictures executive Michael Lynton where Perlmutter rattled off a bunch of female-led superhero movies that floppedElectra, Catwoman, and Supergirl. Setting aside the fact that there were also a bunch of male-led superhero movies that also flopped, Perlmutter seemed to be laboring under the belief that there was no audience for a superhero movie led by a female character. I don’t know what he thought about Captain Marvel making over a billion dollars worldwide.

Perlmutter also reportedly had retrograde opinions about merchandise. In a Vanity Fair profile of Feige, the article claimed that “Perlmutter, citing his years in the toy-making business, reportedly made the decision to scale back production of Black Widow-themed merchandise in 2015 because he believed ‘girl’ superhero products wouldn’t sell.”

It seems like the roadblock to a Black Widow movie and why we didn’t get such a film years ago is because Perlmutter, as the final word on which projects would get a greenlight, didn’t believe in female-led superhero movies. Even when Feige gained the independence to report directly to Disney, it took time to shift the machine in such a direction that Black Widow could get a solo film. Now it’s almost here, and sadly, it appears that it feels like it has arrived too late.

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