Black Widow Stand-Alone: 10 Things Marvel Must Do

In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Wanda Maximoff forces Natasha to recall parts of her training at the mysterious Red Room Academy, a black ops facility for creating female spies posing as a ballet school.

Marvel's Agent Carter explored the origins of the Academy when Peggy Carter and Dum-Dum Dugan infiltrated a similar facility in 1940s Belarus. This Red Room appeared to be a boarding school for girls instead of a ballet academy, and saw its pupils brainwashed by subliminal messages inserted into children's films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

We don't know much else about the Academy other than some of its unorthodox training methods. What were the girls being trained for specifically, and why did they need to be brainwashed?

There's also the question of Natasha Romanoff's true age: in the comics, the Black Widow trainees are given chemical treatments to retain the appearance of youth for decades, and we're never told exactly when Natasha's training took place, so it's conceivable that she might have been operating since the late '50s or early '60s.

Which would give a standalone movie plenty of wiggle room for trying out some retro '60s spy action...