New BLACK WIDOW Photos and Florence Pugh Says the Film Is 'About the Abuse of Women'
While we wait to see if Disney will push back the release date of Marvel’s Black Widow again, we’ve got a few new photos to share with you from the Cate Shortland-directed film featuring Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff, Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, and the mysterious badass villain Taskmaster.
Pugh also talked about the film in a recent interview with Total Film/Games Radar, and she talked about how the story revolves around the severe emotional, physical, psychological abuse and torture the women characters.
“One of the most interesting things about the film is how far Cate went with it. This film is about the abuse of women. It’s about how they get involuntary hysterectomies by the age of eight. It’s about girls who are stolen from around the world. It’s so painful, and it’s so important.
“Part of the excitement for me is that women and girls from around the world are going to see this, and are going to see an abuse story that really was challenged by its own victims. For a Marvel film to be reaching all of those levels, it is so exciting. The best thing about that is, it’s not layered with this colour of grey. You’ll see these women strive and be strong, and they’re assassins – and yet they still need to discuss how they were abused. It’s an incredibly powerful piece.”
It’s great that the Marvel movie is going to take on such a powerful and important subject matter. At the same time, the film is going to deliver the fun entertainment and awesome action sequences that we can expect to see from Marvel.
The director of the film went on to talk about Natasha’s story and how it naturally leant towards these more serious subjects due to the very nature of the character in comparison to the other Avengers:
“She’s the only character that doesn’t have superpowers. We saw that as a strength, because she always has to dig really deep to get out of shit situations. And we just put her in a lot of hard situations. I thought about women walking to the train station being attacked, and what happens.”
She goes on to compare Natasha to Jodie Foster’s Clarice from The Silence of the Lambs:
“Natasha’s like [Jodie Foster’s Clarice] from The Silence Of The Lambs. It’s great, because when she holds her gun, it shakes. But she’s still really tough inside, and resilient. And I wanted to bring that to the character. So you’re not just watching her fly through situations, knowing she’ll get out of it. You want to see her grit and determination. And that’s what we got.”
I love the direction they are taking this story and the themes that it will involve. In the film, 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 will be released in theaters on November 6th, 2020. There are rumors that the movie could get pushed back to 2021, but we’ll have to wait and see if that actually happens. I hope not!