Black Widow Director Reveals The One Scene Kevin Feige Wanted In The Movie
Though Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) famously perishes during the events of 2019's "Avengers: Endgame," the character wasn't quite done with the Marvel Cinematic Universe until her solo outing, 2021's "Black Widow." The majority of the movie takes place roughly around 2016, during the between the events of "Captain America: Civil War" and "Avengers: Infinity War."
"Black Widow" fills several blanks in Natasha's backstory, and even introduces viewers to the closest thing she had to a family before Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) and the rest of her fellow Avengers came along. She spent her youth in a sleeper cell family unit with older Black Widow Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz) as the mother, the super-strong Red Guardian (David Harbour) as the father, and future main MCU Black Widow Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) as her little sister.
Between this revelation and the customary MCU action and suspense, "Black Widow" is full of great scenes. However, director Cate Shortland just revealed that one of the best scenes might not have made it in the movie at all, if it wasn't for the fact that Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige put his foot down.
Kevin Feige wanted to keep the dinner scene
Though "Black Widow" is very much a MCU movie with plenty of action, its beating heart is the strained dynamic between Natasha and her surrogate sleeper agent family. As director Cate Shortland recently told Empire, Kevin Feige recognized this, and did his level best to keep a particular scene that shows their relationship in the movie. The scene in question is the reunion dinner at Melina Vostokoff's farm, and Feige has noted that he considers it the absolute best thing in the entire film. "The second dinner scene which is the heart of the movie," he named his favorite scene during a "Black Widow" watch party event in July (via the Marvel Studios Twitter account).
Evidently, neither Scarlett Johansson nor Shortland really believed in the scene at first, but Feige managed to convince them otherwise. "He doesn't give you many directives, he's very free," Shortland described the situation. "But that was a scene he really felt needed to be in the film, and Scarlett and I kept fighting him on it, saying, 'How will this ever work?' But it became a very alive thing. You've got this bunch of people shipwrecked together, who are still desperately trying to cling onto the roles that they had in Ohio, because that's all they know. That's all they have. And it's beautiful for me."
As Shortland readily notes, Feige's instinct was absolutely right, and the relatively quiet scene does some extremely heavy lifting to establish the characters and their relationship.