‘Black Widow’ Screenwriter Confirms Excised Tony Stark Cameo & Explains New MCU Origin For Taskmaster

*Warning spoilers ahead for “Black Widow.“* 

Marvel Studios and Disney finally debuted their long-awaited solo “Black Widow” movie a full decade after original plans at Lionsgate with former director David Hayter dissolved, and company infighting led to even more delays despite having Scarlett Johansson under an extensive contract after joining the cast of “Iron Man 2.”

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The film takes place between the events of “Captain America: Civil War” and “Avengers: Infinity War,” but doesn’t include any of Natasha Romanoff’s cohorts from The Avengers team outside of an appearance from government babysitter Thunderbolt Ross played by William Hurt. However, the studio had plans to have Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark appear in the film, as screenwriter Eric Pearson has revealed to the Phase Zero podcast. 

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“I do remember now that one version of the script, prior to me, literally had written into it the end moment of ‘Civil War’ with Tony and Natasha,” Pearson recalled about the cut Tony Stark cameo. “That’s the only time I saw Tony Stark’s name in it, and it was just kind of a flag-planted reminder.”

Speaking of changes, Eric Pearson also explained to Comic Book the reasoning behind their controversial move to pivot from their original plan of using Anthony Masters (O.T. Fagbenle‘s Mason?) to Olga Kurylenko‘s Antonia Dreykov. The true identity of the Terminator-like henchman Taskmaster ruffled the feathers of fans as they have been quite vocal online to share their displeasure. However, there was a strong narrative reason for the switch-up, according to Pearson. 

“One of the bigger kind of complications was figuring out a villain plot that could succeed and go unnoticed, which ultimately, I think kind of works out for a spy thriller film and also for Dreykov as an ultimate villain…Tony Masters didn’t seem to really fit into that. And meanwhile, we had this mystery of ‘What happened to Dreykov’s daughter?’ The idea of an accident going wrong and we’ve already got this facility now in the Red Room that is constantly with working on and the idea of mind control and rebuilding and controlling the human brain, the idea of an accident going wrong with a loved one and using the technology to reconstruct that person’s mind finding something new, finding the photographic reflexes in rebuilding that mind that felt like a good Marvel comic book addition to an otherwise more grounded spy thriller thing,” the screenwriter said of their reasoning for the character revamp. 

Oddly enough, Taskmaster’s changes sort of echoed how Marvel tackled Hannah John-Kamen‘s Ghost in “Ant-Man & The Wasp,” trying to tie a new female incarnation of an established character to a villainous father; in the case of Ghost, it was “Ant-Man” baddie Elihas Starr, aka, Egghead.