It should suffice to say that this past year, the Year of Our Lord Thanos 2019, was a pretty good year to be a Marvel fan. Captain Marvel finally addressed one of the MCU’s biggest criticisms — namely, that the series’ films have only been about men (though it’s still bizarre that it took them 20 films to decide that people could be interested in a woman-led superhero film) — and Avengers: Endgame served as a tremendously fun conclusion to a decade’s worth of cinema world-building. Hell, even Spider-Man: Far From Home was alright, even if we’ve soured on it a bit since its release.
But it’s been total radio silence from the mask-wearing section of the Mouse Monopoly since their big Comic-Con panel back in July, and fans have been salivating for new info or footage from the upcoming slate. Specifically, they’ve been reading the tea leaves from promotional campaigns past, and a bunch of Redditors determined that we’d be getting a Black Widow trailer either this week or last.
They were right. Early on Tuesday morning, Marvel dropped the trailer for the hotly-anticipated film, and there was much rejoicing from all over the internet. Or, at least there was until we here at Vanyaland actually watched it.
Here’s the trailer:
Look, we’re not saying that this looks terrible, or that Marvel films are inherently bad, but something about this film — be it the weird ’90s-like costume designs or the action choreography or that CGI-heavy finale or the fact that we’re doing prequels now after Feige and company decided to kill off ScarJo in Endgame (look, you’ve already watched the damn thing if you’re gonna watch it, so no spoiler tags here) — rubs us the wrong way. It feels like they’re trying to squeeze this film into its very last possible release window, and it probably should have come out four or five years ago to really have an impact. That said, the cast looks great, and we’re excited to finally have another Marvel character to dress up as for Halloween now, as you can only do Fat Thor once or otherwise people are going to assume you always dress like that.
And yes, we’re guessing that they’re probably going to set up Florence Pugh as the new Black Widow when this is all said and done to counteract some of the narrative damage that Endgame did to this film’s relevance. This is a Good Thing: we’re fans of Pugh and want to see her paid handsomely for her time, but it seems that the great narrative test of Phase IV will be whether or not people will buy replacements for the characters that they know and love and narratives oriented around tertiary protagonists that aren’t necessarily built to lead blockbusters. That said, they’ve cared plenty up until this point, so who’s to say that anything will change?
Anyway, we’ll all find out soon enough, as Black Widow hits theaters on May 1.