A moment of playful teasing between sisters in Marvel’s new Black Widow film actually stands as a not-so-subtle critique about how far the superhero secret agent has come in the decade since Scarlett Johansson started playing her.

It’s all about “the pose.”

Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, a young woman raised in the same brutal assassin program as Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, cannot resist tormenting her big sister over her signature move. You know the one: legs straddling the floor, back arched, one hand extended behind her while the other clutches the ground. It’s a pin-up pose more than a warrior stance, and Natasha’s snarky kid sister does not let her forget it. “You’re a total poser,” she says.

Her diss is also a nod of acknowledgement to the fans and critics who have been saying the same thing ever since Black Widow entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2010’s Iron Man 2. The character has been a comic book mainstay since 1964, and a regular supporting player in Marvel’s movies, but only now is she getting her first solo film, debuting this weekend in theaters and as a bonus buy on Disney+. The consensus so far is that the Black Widow stand-alone, directed by Cate Shortland, finally gets the character right. It took them long enough. 

You can chart the evolution of Natasha through the remarks Johansson has made over the years, expressing her own frustrations. In a 2012 interview I did for EW with her and the rest of the Avengers, the actress was blunt about what it would take for Hollywood to give her a stand-alone superhero film:

“I’d have to wear pasties to green-light any of these movies,” she said, seemingly annoyed that the emphasis on sexuality had consistently undermined the quality of the few female-led superhero projects that actually had been made. “I think they’re always fighting in a bra, so while it might be exciting for a still photo, it’s ridiculous.”

The problem did not extend to all comic book movies, she noted. “I do think superheroine movies are normally really corny and bad,” Johansson said. “They’re always like, fighting in four-inch heels with your [hefts chest] like a two-gun salute.”

At that point, Chris Hemsworth noted that the X-Men series had some respectable female heroes. Johansson smiled at him. 

“We’ll get more,” she said.

Her frustrations were still there around eight years later, but by then Johansson had come to include her own performance as part of the problem with female comic book heroes. “Initially the character really started as a sexy secretary with a skill set on the side,” Johansson said in the 2019 press conference for Avengers: Endgame. 

Iron Man 2 director Jon Favreau, who happened to be moderating that press conference, interjected that Natasha was only “posing as” that, which Johansson acknowledged. But to steal a line from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: We are what we pretend to be. When Natasha is first introduced in that film, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts described her to Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark as “a potentially very expensive sexual harassment lawsuit.”

Johansson went on to say that she felt Natasha was less an object of fantasy in her 2012 appearance. “The next time we saw her in The Avengers she was one of the boys, for better or worse. That made sense then,” Johansson said. But Black Widow had much further to go.

Powering that journey, Johansson said, was the people who loved her the most: Black Widow fans. “The fans and audiences have pushed Marvel and all the studios and filmmakers to throw up on the screen what’s going on in the zeitgeist, wanting to see diverse films and casts that represent their own aspirations and how they feel,” she said. “The character has grown in reaction to that and the movies have grown in reaction to that fan encouragement.”

At the time of that press conference, a Black Widow movie was already rumored, and indeed was in development, even though Marvel’s notorious secrecy precluded her or anyone from disclosing that. The question of “When will Black Widow get a stand-alone?” is one Johansson has had to endure for more than a decade. There was never a satisfying answer to give.

So why did it take so long? Vanity Fair asked Disney for a sit-down with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige to discuss the onscreen journey of the character, but we were turned down. Still, few blame the delay on him. Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo, a notorious Marvel secret spiller, has said Feige fought hard for a woman-led superhero film years ago and faced intense resistance from an executive who now no longer oversees the MCU.

“When we did the first Avengers, Kevin Feige told me, ‘Listen, I might not be here tomorrow,’” Ruffalo told The Independent last year. “He’s like, ‘Ike [Isaac Perlmutter, Disney’s largest shareholder at the time] does not believe that anyone will go to a female-starring superhero movie. So if I am still here tomorrow, you will know that I won that battle.’”

Feige survived. But even so, it was years before the 2018 sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp included a female hero in a Marvel movie title, and slightly longer before 2019’s Captain Marvel included a woman as the solo lead. 

Perlmutter was sidelined by Disney brass from involvement in the Marvel movie production process in 2015, and was pushed aside from its TV, animation, print and other creative operations in 2019. He is reportedly a close ally of Donald Trump, which might provide some indication of Perlmutter’s overall perspective of the world, and he’s also notoriously secretive, never doing interviews. But there is some other evidence of his views on female superheroes.

The cache of leaked Sony emails from 2015 revealed one he sent disparaging other female superhero movies like Elektra, Catwoman, and Supergirl. The context of that email was unclear, and none of those are considered critical or commercial successes; given Johansson’s own comments about bad female superhero flicks, the two might have some areas of agreement. But Perlmutter also reportedly stepped on female characters in other ways. 

In a 2017 Vanity Fair cover story, studio sources confided to my colleague Joanna Robinson 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.”

There are other clues as well. Iron Man 3 writer-director Shane Black didn’t mention Perlmutter by name, but pointed the finger in his direction when he told Uproxx that Rebecca Hall was supposed to play the central villain of that movie until it was nixed by executives. “We had finished the script and we were given a no-holds-barred memo saying that cannot stand and we’ve changed our minds because, after consulting, we’ve decided that toy won’t sell as well if it’s a female,” Black said. “We had to change the entire script because of toy making. Now, that’s not Feige. That’s Marvel corporate, but now you don’t have that problem anymore.”

By that point, Perlmutter was out of the picture. And Feige was in charge. A pathway had opened for Natasha Romanoff to finally clear the red from her ledger.

The narrative arc for Black Widow has always been a redemption story. She’s a former assassin trying to do enough good in the world to outweigh the bad she once committed. In the Black Widow film, she finally reckons with those things directly, revealing a troubled backstory that previous films only hinted about.

In some ways, the painful journey of the character mirrors the bumpy, troubled evolution she has gone through with viewers. “That is such a powerful journey to see anybody take, but certainly to see a woman onscreen represented in that way: a flawed superhero with a gray moral compass coming to terms with what’s happened to her,” Johansson told me in 2019, in another roundtable with her Avengers costars. “It’s definitely shown some sort of path for these other female superheroes to be able to walk down. I certainly don’t take credit for that, though.”

The journey definitely came with its share of barbs. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, some fans objected to a scene in which Natasha called herself a “monster” because she had been sterilized during her secret Russian training program. (Like her infamous “pose,” this gets reassessed and confronted in the new Black Widow film too.) Others objected to her romantic relationship with Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, and her mild flirtations with Captain America.

In 2015, on the set of Captain America: Civil War, Johansson talked with me about the second-guessing her character always received from fans. “You know, I’m happy that people scrutinize the Widow’s storylines and care about it and are invested. I’d much rather it be like that than have a kind of ‘meh’ reaction. For me to have people say that would be, ouch, you know? Everything that I’ve done with the Widow, to me makes sense. It’s in line with active decisions that I’ve made for the character.”

She was happy to push buttons. “Yes, of course! That’s better than the mediocre reaction, definitely. We expect that. The character is so beloved. You can only hope that people are going to have opinions about it, you know? She somehow ends up always on top, even if you’re not always in agreement with how she gets there.”

Now that Black Widow has reached a new phase, the only apparent downside is that it’s the end of that journey. She sacrificed herself to save the world in Avengers: Endgame, which was another controversial move that divided fans of the character.

The stand-alone Black Widow film is a throwback, set around the time that Natasha was a fugitive after the events of Civil War. But is there a future for Natasha Romanoff?

Maybe. Feige’s smiling silence when asked directly about this possibility by Entertainment Tonight’s Ash Crossan in the video below speaks very loudly. 

Never count her out. The one constant of all the different iterations of Black Widow is that she is a survivor.

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