Marvel's Black Widow movie has MCU fans absolutely livid about what they did to this villain
This was such a big opportunity wasted.
Alright, let’s waste absolutely no time getting into this. Spoiler alert right here.
SPOILER ALERT: This post will contain key plot details to Marvel’s Black Widow. Feel free to watch the movie then come back to this post.
Full disclosure: As a Natasha Romanov fan, Black Widow is really enjoyable. It peels back the layers of her in exactly the ways we’d always wanted.
It drops us in the timeline right after Civil War and explores her past, her “family,” that infamous Budapest adventure with Hawkeye, and even the moment she defected from the Red Room.
The movie also introduces us to a new villain — The Taskmaster. A villain that, apparently, only exists as a direct result of a mistake a ruthless Romanov made on that trip to Budapest.
As the final step in Natasha’s transition to SHIELD, she had to kill Dreykov who was the leader of the Red Room and the creator of the Black Widow Project. She decided to blow him up despite knowing his daughter, Antonia, was in the room. She did it anyway.
Turns out, all of these years later, they’d both somehow survived. Dreykov was relatively unscathed but Antonia was left with facial scarring.
Those scars led to Dreykov using that as an opportunity to turn his daughter into Taskmaster — an incredible mercenary who can mimic any fighting style. And that is, quite literally, all she does.
That’s where my only gripe with this movie comes in.