Black Widow Writer Reveals How Fast He Wrote The First Draft

Marvel Studios' Black Widow movie has had a long path to its debut thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, but fans may be surprised to learn how quickly the first draft of its story was committed to the page. Eric Pearson tells Variety that all it took to get the first draft of the blockbuster down was 11 days. "We got our good bones down meeting with Kevin [Feige] and [co-producer] Brian Chapek and [director] Cate Shortland and talking to Scarlett [Johansson] a lot," he said. "She was phoning in and then I was locking it into a document that was just like a blueprint. And once I know what I'm doing, I write fast. …That was the first draft, but we did a lot of rewrites."

While Pearson is credited as the screenwriter for Black Widow, the story credit goes to Ned Benson and WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer. Speaking to ComicBook.com in February, Schaeffer remained guarded about how Black Widow may or may not set up a sequel.

"I mean anybody who knows Natasha knows the lady likes to leap off of things," Schaeffer said. "So that's about as much of context as I can give to you right now."

Speaking to ComicBook.com more recently, director Cate Shortland discussed how the film manages to create stakes even it takes place before Natasha's death in Avengers: Endgame. "Kevin Feige spoke about that from the beginning," Shortland said. "We spoke about that even though we knew what had happened to her in Endgame, it still had to feel at times that she was in trouble. Say with that Taskmaster fight on the bridge: we wanted to make it really raw. I kept thinking about women that have been attacked on the street. So we wanted to make it really gritty, and that other people could relate to it. It wasn't two sort of superhero characters fighting. It was Natasha fighting for her life and I think that's kind of the spirit of the film that we wanted to take throughout."

The synopsis for Black Widow's story says, "Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow confronts the darker parts of her ledger when a dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past arises. Pursued by a force that will stop at nothing to bring her down, Natasha must deal with her history as a spy and the broken relationships left in her wake long before she became an Avenger."

Scarlett Johansson stars as Natasha/Black Widow, with Florence Pugh as Yelena, David Harbour as Alexei/The Red Guardian, and Rachel Weisz as Melina. The film is directed by Cate Shortland and produced by Kevin Feige.

What do you think? Let us known in the comments section. Black Widow, the first film in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will debut simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ with Premier Access on July 9th.