SPOILER ALERT: It looks as though the big twist for ‘Black Widow’ has been SPOILED! Read further at your own peril.
Rachel Weisz co-stars in ‘Black Widow’ as Melina, a character that is known to have also come up through the ranks of the Russian Red Room just as Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) did. In all the promotional material up to this point, she is shown as part of Natasha’s “first family,” along with Florence Pugh‘s Yelena Belova, and David Harbour‘s Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian. It has appeared in the trailers that this quartet assembles to battle The Taskmaster.
On Super Bowl Sunday, a new trailer for ‘Black Widow’ premiered, and Disney also released four new character posters— Natasha, Yelena, Melina, and Alexei. There was not a poster for Taskmaster. Twitter also unveiled new emojis featuring the same four characters. Once again, no Taskmaster.
Via Screen Rant:
The #BlackWidow Twitter emojis are here!#NatashaRomanoff#RedGuardian#YelenaBelova #MelinaVostokoff
But no #Taskmaster 🤔
— Screen Rant (@screenrant) February 2, 2020
But in releasing both the character posters and the emojis, it has been revealed that Weisz’s character’s full name is Melina Vostokoff, which — one simple Google search later — turns out to be the real name of the Black Widow comic book villain Iron Maiden. (This is also an alias used by the Ultimate Black Widow, after being gifted with a suit of armor by her fiancé, Tony Stark.)
This doesn’t give everything away. There is still the question of The Taskmaster, but is it possible that he isn’t actually the film’s main villain and that we have just been misled up to this point? There had previously been speculation that O-T Fagbenle‘s character, known only as “Mason” would turn out to be The Taskmaster, but there are some who think it might be Melina under that skull mask.
The Marvel movies aren’t actually all that faithful to the comic books and various characters have been altered in translation to the big screen. It’s possible that Melina Vostokoff and The Taskmaster have been combined into one movie character. It’s also possible that this Melina Vostakoff isn’t a villain.
But if she is, unfortunately, what does Marvel/Disney do now? IF this turns out to be true, has the movie been SPOILED? There are still three months to go before it opens. That’s presumably not enough time to make changes, and that probably wouldn’t be a good idea anyway if the movie was made with one ending in mind.
Hmmm…
‘Black Widow’ arrives in theaters on May 1, 2020.
