Warning: This post contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.
At the beginning of Endgame, we saw how differently all the Avengers handled the snap. Natasha Romanoff AKA Black Widow didn’t take any kind of break, she got back to work immediately.
She ran point for all of the surviving heroes from the compound and kept up training. She was constantly looking for a way to reverse Thanos’ Snap to try and bring back the people who weren’t there with them.
Essentially, the Avengers were the family Natasha never had and as we later saw, she was willing to do whatever it takes to save them and the rest of the world.
But it seems Natasha almost had a very different, and very heartbreaking, job in the film. According to Slate, directors Joe and Anthony Russo said they tinkered with the idea of having Natasha caring for kids who were left behind after the Snap.
“One thing that we talked about a lot – and I thought was really profound, but it was almost too large of an idea for us to wrangle, but we did try for a while – is just the idea that one-quarter of all children have no parents. Assuming you started with two parents. So that’s a lot of global orphans. Just the staggering number of that. I believe at one point really early in development, Black Widow was actually leading the organization in D.C. that was in charge of orphans, basically. That was what she was heading up five years later. But yes, it’s fascinating when you start running it down.”
Let’s be honest, Endgame was sad enough as it is without throwing in millions of orphans into the mix.
We found out in Avengers: Age of Ultron that Natasha couldn’t have her own children after being sterilised as part of her initiation into the spy world. So, it might have been interesting to see Natasha caring for the children years later, however, the movie was already so long, so it’s probably a good thing it didn’t happen.
They might have changed her job, but they did keep her sacrifice and recently defended the reason they had her die for the Soul Stone.
Joe told Entertainment Weekly, “It’s a fight to see who’s going to kill themselves.”
“It’s a crazy concept for a scene. And as you’ve seen in The Avengers, she’s a better fighter than he is. So when it comes down to a fight between the two of them, she wins.”
Thankfully for Black Widow fans, Scarlett Johansson will be returning in a Black Widow movie which is rumoured to be in production as we speak.