After several delays, the long-awaited Black Widow movie finally has a firm release date - however, the Scarlett Johansson-fronted Avengers spinoff isn’t the first time Marvel attempted to bring Natasha Romanoff to the big screen in a solo movie. In fact, Marvel had plans to make a Black Widow movie as early as the mid-noughties. Way back in 2004, it was reported that Lionsgate had struck a deal with Marvel Studios to make a film about one of the comic giant’s most popular female characters.

Marvel Studios co-founder Avi Arad was set to produce this Black Widow project while David Hayter was attached to direct and pen its script. Hayter was then best known for co-writing the screenplays for fellow Marvel adaptations X-Men and X2: X-Men United; of course, Hayter is also beloved among video game fans for providing the growly tones of Metal Gear Solid's Solid Snake also. Hayter would have made his directorial debut with the Black Widow movie had it gone ahead.

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Hayter offered some insight as to what his Black Widow movie would’ve been about in Peter Hanson’s 2010 book Tales From The Script: 50 Hollywood Screenwriters Share Their Stories. Hayter revealed he’d spent a year penning a script for what was essentially a Black Widow origin movie that would’ve followed Natasha from her super-spy training with the KGB and the fall of the Soviet Union through to her time as a mercenary in America and being called back to her homeland. In David Hayter’s own words:

She’s a freelance mercenary, and she’s called back to where she was brought up to face her past.  What I tried to do was use the backdrop of the splintered Soviet Empire – a lawless insane asylum with four hundred some odd nuclear missile silos.  It was all about loose nukes, and I felt it was very timely and very cool.”

Black Widow superhero pose in Iron Man 2

By 2006, Lionsgate had bailed on Hayter’s Black Widow movie after several other female-focused action movies like Aeon Flux, Bloodrayne and Ultraviolet flopped at the box office. As Hayter told IGN in 2006, he and Marvel tried to find alternative financing for the film, but failed to find a studio “that was willing to take the movie, and the character, seriously.” Ultimately, the project was shelved.

When Scarlett Johansson made her MCU debut as Natasha in Iron Man 2, talk of making a Black Widow solo movie sparked up again and David Hayter expressed interest in reviving his abandoned project. Unfortunately for Hayter, that didn’t come to be and the forthcoming Black Widow movie will feature Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland directing Natasha Romanoff's solo adventure from a screenplay penned by Thor: Ragnarok co-writer Eric Pearson. It must be a gut punch for Hayter that his movie won’t see the light of day but the real kicker is that while Hayter was writing his Black Widow script, he had a daughter and decided to name her Natasha after the superhero – which is a pretty permanent reminder of the movie he didn’t get to make.

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