10 Characters The MCU Wishes It Could've Introduced Differently

6. Black Widow

Natasha Romanoff has been a problem for Marvel. Not a big one, not a glaring one, but a character that has caused much head-scratching in board room and script reads alike. In short, she was meant to be a background character in the first Avengers film, and then occasionally pop up throughout the MCU to add star-power to the standalone movies of more marketable heroes.

Scarlet Witch, Captain Marvel, and The Wasp were supposed to be the franchise's leading ladies (and Widow's two-dimensional writing in the early films proves) but, typically, Marvel spent too long getting around to them. All the while, Scarlett Johansson made the character feel like the warm light that all the other Avengers were just having to orbit around, she felt way, way more important than Marvel ever intended her to be.

A standalone Black Widow movie then became the only film fans seemed to actively demand, but the problem was they couldn't fit it in until after the decision to kill the character had been made. The compromise is a slightly awkward origin story for someone who's already been written out. Had Marvel known how popular she'd become, she'd likely have been afforded this privilege much, much earlier on.