David Hayter says his Black Widow movie would have included a “Tom Sawyer” needle-drop.
Replying to a Twitter post with a clip from The Iron Claw, Hayter revealed that his version of Marvel’s Black Widow included a “Tom Sawyer” by Rush needle-drop in a flashback sequence featuring a young Natasha Romanoff.
“It’s kind of heartbreaking, But in my BLACK WIDOW movie, when twelve-year-old Natasha first stood up to fight her Red Room comrades, I was going to needle-drop Tom Sawyer,” Hayter wrote.
Hayter was originally tapped to write and direct a Black Widow movie for Lionsgate in 2004, at which point the studio owned the rights to the character. Lionsgate, however, dropped the project in 2006, and the character’s rights reverted back to Marvel.
What would David Hayter’s Black Widow movie have been about?
“What I tried to do was use the backdrop of the splintered Soviet Empire—a lawless insane asylum with 400-some odd nuclear missile silos,” Hayter later said of the script for his Black Widow movie, via Warped Factor. “It was all about loose nukes, and I felt it was very timely and very cool. Unfortunately, as I was coming up on the final draft, a number of female vigilante movies came out. We had Tomb Raider and Kill Bill, which were the ones that worked, but then we had BloodRayne and Ultraviolet and Æon Flux. Æon Flux didn’t open well, and three days after it opened, the studio said, ‘We don’t think it’s time to do this movie.’”
Hayter expressed interest in reviving the project after Scarlet Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff made her MCU debut; however, the studio ended up hiring Cate Shortland to direct the Black Widow solo film, while Eric Pearson wrote the screenplay and Jac Schaeffer and Ned Benson the story.
Black Widow was released in United States theaters in July 2021. The movie is currently streaming on Disney+.
