Black Widow Trailer Review: 8 Ups & 3 Downs

3. No "Woke"-Bashing Opportunities

Let's get this distasteful one out of the way immediately. There has been an unfortunate trend, at times recently, that has seen any movie even remotely looking to "be woke" in marketing - see Ghostbusters, Terminator: Dark Fate and Charlie's Angels for just a few - being tanked online by a certain kind of movie-goer who gets all hot and bothered by any challenge to the current order of things and "traditional" power dynamics. It's a tired, boring discourse, but hey, as long as it continues to burn and destroy films before anyone has even seen whether they are any good, it deserves mention.

Thankfully, there's nothing overt in here that could attract that sort of trigger-happy attention. That is not to say that the movie might not explore those sorts of ideas inherently, or that it would be wrong to do so, but not going with a "girls do it differently" marketing line and feeding the wrong people ammunition is a smart move in the current marketplace. Or the current online hellscape, if you'd like a more pertinent term.

Call it unwelcome pandering if you like and criticise the mention of it all you like, but it's a conscious decision that would have probably gone differently if those three mentioned films had fared better.