MCU’s Black Widow: Is Tony Stark’s Iron Man responsible for yet another super-villain?
In the upcoming Marvel movie Black Widow, Scarlett Johansson's character Black Widow is facing Taskmaster, whose origin might be traced back to Robert Downey Jr's persona Tony Stark.
We fell in love with Scarlett Johansson's character Black Widow AKA Natasha Romanoff when she was first introduced in the MCU back in Jon Favreau's "Iron Man 2" and have been patiently waiting for her solo flick for a whole decade.
While the wait has been even longer than it was supposed to be because of the global pandemic, we at "HollywoodMask" have been giving a lot of thought to the iconic villain, Taskmaster, set to go up against the super spy.
As some of you might already know, the Taskmaster is somewhat of a super soldier that has the ability to learn his opponent's fighting style and use that same knowledge against them. That makes him a formidable foe, especially, for someone with no superhuman powers like Black widow.
Let's not get into the details of his comic book origins, but focus on how the MCU might justify his abilities. We have a good amount of evidence to believe that the Taskmaster is yet another super-villain whose origin in the Marvel Cinematic Universe can be credited to Tony Stark AKA Iron Man.
The "Black Widow" trailers so far have confirmed that the Taskmaster's fighting style is consistent with Hawkeye and Black Widow at the least as we have seen him take aim with an arrow tipped with an explosive that looks a lot like the one Hawkeye uses and using the same fighting stance as Black Widow in an intense one on one combat scene.
The only other time that we had seen something like that being done was when Iron Man fought against Captain America in the latter half of "Captain America: Civil War." The AI built into the Iron Man armor analyzed Captain America's combat strategy then immediately went on the offensive.
Now, we're not blaming anyone here, but we all know that Tony Stark has intentionally or unintentionally contributed to making a lot of MCU super-villains. The most notable one being James Spader's portrayal of the psychopathic robot Ultron in "Avengers: Age Of Ultron."
Even after Tony gave his life to save half of all life in the universe, Quentin Beck/Mysterio's dislike of Tony led him to try and gain control of E.D.I.T.H. in "Spider-Man: Far From Home." We learned then that there are a lot of ex-Stark Industries employees that detest Tony Stark.
One of those people might have had access to Tony's lab or his mainframe and stolen the combat algorithm that he created. Or, it's not like the people who trained someone as skilled as Black Widow herself wouldn't be able to acquire the technology all on their own.
Either way, there is a suspicious degree of overlap between these two characters' abilities. Apart from the ability to understand and counter his opponent's fighting style, Taskmaster is said to run the infamous Red Room so it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that he is was a very skilled tactician and fighter, to begin with.
Marvel Studios' #BlackWidow arrives in theaters November 6. pic.twitter.com/oyIGyAxm59 — Black Widow (@theblackwidow) April 3, 2020
More than anything, we are dying to know what Natasha meant when she suspensefully said, "I have a lot of red in my ledger," back in the first "Avengers" movie.
Marvel Studios have already announced that "Black Widow" will be coming to the theaters on November 6, 2020, and I'm sure that they will not disappoint. We hope that the dire situation all around the world because of this deadly pandemic settles down by then.