If one goes searching around in Marvel’s post-Endgame films and TV shows for a unifying theme, a few — like betrayal and hidden enemies posing as allies — emerge. But above all else, this era of Marvel’s storytelling is about mourning the people we lost in the big 2019 battle against Thanos. You can see the absence of Tony Stark haunting Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Far From Home while both WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier grapple with the absence of Vision and Steve Rogers, respectively.
Black Widow, of course, is the long overdue love letter and eulogy to Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff. The reminder of what the MCU lost in her death is in every frame of the movie where Johansson oozes star power as she smirks, cries, and kicks her way through a solo adventure. But Black Widow’s final minutes, filmed several months after main production wrapped, both serve as more pointed farewell to Natasha and indicate that the MCU may not be done mourning its most talented spy.
After the credits roll, we see that Florence Pugh’s Yelena Bolova has finally gotten the dog she always wanted and is flourishing in whatever new life she’s created for herself. Yelena goes to visit her sister Natasha’s grave in a remote clearing in Ohio. According to Black Widow director Cate Shortland, the out-of-the-way location was inspired by Johansson’s claim that, unlike Tony Stark, Natasha would abhor a massive public funeral. So this monument to Natasha’s spirit (her body, presumably, is still somewhere on Vormir) is a private one that maybe only a few ever visit.
While Johansson may be right that Natasha would prefer a private memorial, Romanoff fans were fairly salty that Tony Stark alone got the big send-off in the final minutes of Avengers: Endgame. At the time, Endgame co-writer Stephen McFeely told The New York Times: “Tony’s this massive public figure and she’s been a cipher the whole time. It wasn’t necessarily honest to the character to give her a funeral.” Endgame co-director Joe Russo told Entertainment Tonight: “Natasha has another movie coming out. Tony does not. When you’re dealing with storytelling real estate in a three-hour movie, there’s only so much of it, and someone else has another film coming, there’s always the opportunity to bring closure in that other movie. In this movie, we had to bring closure to Tony Stark.”
Leaving aside the fact that the plot of Spider-Man: Far From Home significantly hinged around the legacy and lack of Tony Stark, not every fan was convinced by those explanations from the Avengers: Endgame creatives. It’s true, of course, that Tony Stark and Robert Downey Jr. are the figures who started it all for Marvel Studios in 2008, but sidelining Natasha’s funeral still stings because the character has been pushed aside again and again in the MCU.
In fact, an early version of a WandaVision script tackled this unbalanced memorializing head on. A production storyboard revealed Wanda angrily saying: “I’m sick of everyone acting like Tony Stark is the only person we lost. Like he’s the only Avenger that ever was. Too bad, then, if you’re Natasha, but at least she was flesh and blood, right? But where are the memorials for Vision?”
The final version of WandaVision did not call out the MCU this directly but Black Widow director Cate Shortland told Empire she was aware how Natasha fans felt: “In Endgame, the fans were upset that Natasha did not have a funeral. So what we did in this film was allow the ending to be the grief the individuals felt, rather than a big public outpouring. I think that’s a fitting ending for her.”
That desire to memorialize Natasha, and placate fans, may have influenced the location of the film’s end-of-credits scene, but the substance of the scene itself was likely a result of how brightly Pugh shone in her MCU debut. Two things happened between the main production on Black Widow wrapping in October 2019 and this end-of-credits sequence being filmed in 2020: 1) Marvel executives were able to get a look at Pugh’s performance and 2) the writers on the Disney+ Hawkeye series had started putting their season together.
As various writers on the Disney+ series have explained to me, rounding out the casting on those shows often involves picking and choosing from a roster of available MCU characters. Sometimes the TV writers are nudged by Marvel executives to go in a certain direction and sometimes they have characters snatched away from them because they’re needed for another show. If Hawkeye needed a charismatic antagonist chasing down Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton, Marvel knew they had a hit in Pugh.
Pugh herself told Variety that until she shot the gravesite scene, she didn’t realize Marvel would be using her again so soon. (Fans have been pretty sure she would be appearing in Hawkeye ever since the actress cropped up in Atlanta in early 2021.) The end-of-credits scene reveals Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine. This character was supposed to make her debut here in Black Widow before a Covid scheduling shuffle resulted in her first appearing in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier where she recruited morally shady Captain America wannabe John Walker (Wyatt Russell). Yelena says a few things to Val that make it clear they’ve already been together before Val gives her the assignment of tracking down Clint Barton.
Black Widow was intentionally largely free of appearances from other MCU figures. Marvel chief Kevin Feige reportedly told director Cate Shortland that Natasha didn’t “need the boys.” Other than Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt) on Natasha’s heels, the only other appearance was a voice cameo from Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton. Natasha’s S.H.I.E.L.D. partner also got quite a few mentions, including the revelation that the pair once spent two days in a Hungarian ventilation shaft together. It was a clever reminder of how close these two have been throughout the MCU.
Val tells Yelena that Clint is responsible for Natasha’s death and we all know that’s not exactly the case. In fact, Clint fought his old friend tooth and nail on the Vormir cliff for the honor of dying to capture the Soul Stone. (An earlier version of the Endgame script had Clint dying instead of Natasha.) But an emotionally vulnerable Yelena might be in a place where she could be manipulated into believing Clint is responsible for Natasha’s death.
Why does Val want Clint? Time will tell but I suspect it has something to do with the time Clint spent post-Thanos snap playing Ronin around the globe. You remember, he racked up a bunch of red on his ledger.
What this likely means, other than the joy of getting more Yelena very soon (Hawkeye is scheduled to debut later this year), is that at least some of that Disney+ series will involve Barton both atoning for his Ronin activities and further grappling with Natasha’s death. Even though he tried to stop her, Clint will likely still feel guilt that Natasha died so he could live and Yelena is still very much in her grief. In other words, Johansson may be done with the Marvel Studios, but Marvel isn’t done grieving and honoring Natasha yet.
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