Black Widow's connection to Hawkeye on Disney Plus was a surprise to nearly everyone involved

From the outside, Marvel Studios movies seem like they’re part of a tightly calibrated machine where every piece is working in concert with every other piece, which is why it feels so strange when something happens that doesn’t seem right—like Bruce Banner’s inexplicably non-Hulk appearance in the Shang-Chi stinger. Apparently, though, the Marvel Studios machine is much more slapped-together than we’d think, at least if a recent revelation about the Black Widow stinger is anything to go by.

For those who missed it: Black Widow ends with Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova mourning the death of her (sort of) sister Natasha (as seen in Avengers: Endgame), at which point Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ still-mysterious character shows up and, basically, tells her that Clint Barton murdered the Black Widow. (We talked about it and its implications for the wider MCU at the time.) It was a pretty obvious tease for the then-upcoming Hawkeye show, which made good on it last week when Yelena showed up and tried to kill Hawkeye.

Standard MCU stuff, with one thing setting up another thing and all of the pieces falling into place, right? Well, no. According to The Hollywood Reporter, getting Yelena into Hawkeye was head writer Jonathan Igla’s idea, and after he “lobbied” for it with Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, he was told that Black Widow would end with a tease for Yelena going after Clint on Hawkeye… but he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone else working on Hawkeye.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to anyone else at the time, Feige went to Black Widow screenwriter Eric Pearson and told him that the movie should end with a post-credits scene where Julia Louis-Dreyfus tells Yelena to go after Hawkeye. When Pearson asked why, he says Marvel told him “don’t worry about it.” He also talked to THR later and said he felt “super guilty” that some other writer was now going to have to come along later and deal with a thing that he had set up in his movie, but we now know that he was the one dealing with a thing that Igla had set up for Hawkeye.

This is all probably happening on a pretty long timeline, with these projects all taking a while and COVID having knocked Marvel’s schedule around anyway, but it sounds like Marvel came up with a plan and then retroactively went back to set up that plan rather than actually setting things up naturally—or, as Pearson feared, throwing out twists and then leaving future writers to solve them.

It doesn’t seem like a bad system, and things obviously always tend to work out for Marvel, but it might make you wonder what the hell the studio was planning to do with Black Widow if not actively tease whatever Yelena’s next story was going to be. And if future stories are dictating what happens in previous stories, how much of a plan can there even be? Maybe Marvel Studios isn’t a machine at all, but a group of people all trying to make it seem like one?

It’s hard to say, since someone being told “don’t worry about it” when they ask why they have to include a specific scene in their movie is a big vote in favor it being a machine. Hopefully the Hawkeye team at least know why their show seems to be working so hard to set up the return of that big villain.