Black Widow Movie: 10 Things It Must Include

5. Winter Soldier-Style Espionage

Black Widow Winter Soldier
Marvel Studios

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is still the MCU's best film, and a lot of that comes down to its brilliant emulation of classic Cold War drama.

Mirroring classic seventies conspiracy films like Three Days of the Condor and All the President's Men, TWS roots itself primarily in a tacit kind of paranoia that defined those earlier works, displaying it with a nod and a wink right down to the fact that Robert Redford, the star of both those films, plays the villain. It's just brilliant, and while no one wants to see just another Winter Soldier, there are certainly lessons the film can provide going forward.

Black Widow is a spy first and foremost, and to date, the Russo bros' first Marvel film has done the best job of portraying that element of the character. It's as much Nat's film as it Steve's, and it's that same kind of tone any Widow film should look to emulate whether it's set in the past, present or future.

It's all well and good making yet another superhero film, but that portion of the Marvel Universe has always worked best as a genre in and of itself, blurring the lines between heroism and villainy with a boastful emulation of classic Cold War conspiracy.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.