Cate Shortland, the Australian filmmaker has been roped in to direct Black Widow, an action-adventure film starring Scarlett Johansson from Marvel Studios.
The film has been in development for awhile but picked up momentum earlier this year when Jac Schaeffer was brought in to pen the script with Kevin Feige as the producer. The studio met with more than 70 filmmakers for the role before landing on Shortland, who was arguably an early favourite after a promising meeting with Johansson.
Johansson admired Shortland’s handling of the female lead in Lore, a critically acclaimed 2012 drama set in Germany and direction of Berlin Syndrome, a 2017 thriller starring Teresa Palmer.
Though Marvel had no comment on the news, keeping plot details under wraps, the film might be set before the events of the first Avengers movie that’ll find the actress reprising her role as the Russian spy turned super heroine. The movie will be Marvel’s second female-centric film after Captain Marvel, which is set to open on 8 March 2019.
Jac Schaeffer has written the most recent draft for Black Widow and it seems that fans who have been pushing for her own movie, since she first appeared in Iron Man 2, will finally get to see their favourite Marvel character helming a film alone. With the latest phase of Marvel films coming to a close, Marvel saw this as the best time to move forward with the project.
