Black Widow Writer is Getting Hate Mail For Taskmaster Twist

Black Widow finally hit theatres and Disney+ Premier Access last week, and it’s had the most successful movie opening since the pandemic began. The new Marvel film has been met with mostly positive reactions and is currently “Certified Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes with an 80% critics score and 92% audience score. Despite most of the love for the movie, there was one character who has gotten a lot of mixed reactions online, and that’s Taskmaster. Warning: Black Widow Spoiler Ahead! Many fans were unhappy with the movie’s use of the villain and didn’t care for the twist that she was Dreykov’s daughter and not Tony Masters from the comics. Recently, ComicBook.com’s Phase Zero podcast had the chance to chat with Black Widow writer, Eric Pearson, and he revealed he’s gotten hate mail over Taskmaster.

“I got one. I made the mistake of looking in direct message requests and someone said, ‘I don’t mean to be out of line, but Taskmaster was the biggest betrayal of my life.’ I got mad for a second and then I was like, ‘Well, you’ve had a pretty good life then.’ If that’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, then you should be psyched because someone in a movie wasn’t who you wanted them to be,” Pearson shared.

“Taskmaster was going to be involved and there was versions before I came that was Tony Masters,” Pearson explained. “I kept thinking, I was like, ‘Can this guy somehow not just be a goon?’ Because Dreykov in the Red Room is the thing that’s tied into Natasha personally in her past of giant, nefarious, that as we learned, the spy station, that is circling the globe in the atmosphere. Why is there this guy? Why would this guy be an arm of them? That’s what I kept trying to be… Trust me, I looked very, very far for how do we get this Tony Masters guy to believably be an agent of the Red Room? And then just leaned more towards other things were making sense, other parts of the puzzle were adding up.”

He continued, “Oh, they stole from Ohio the cellular blueprint of the basal ganglia, the way to deconstruct freewill. Okay. They’ve got the ability to rebuild the mind. Oh, Dreykov’s daughter, Natasha used her as bait, blew her up. Well, what if she didn’t survive and this guy who has a lot of brain science, was that a good way to find these photographic reflexes? It just seemed to make more sense. I mean, that’s the good thing, is they really, at Marvel, they treat you for your story. Is this working for your story? And everyone felt like it was so we went with it. It felt like it made it more personal and I mean, I hope that fans like it. I know that some won’t.”

What did you think of the Taskmaster reveal in Black Widow? Tell us in the comments!

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