How Age of Ultron follows up Winter Soldier plus Black Widow film status

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

So, towards the end of CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, Cap sets out to hunt down the titular good/bad guy. It seems that CAPTAIN AMERICA 3 will directly follow up with this plot thread, which begs the question of how Captain America would sidestep this in order to deal with the Ultron threat. Joss Whedon actually addressed this in recently and I’m happy to hear it won’t be ignored.

In Whedon’s words:

The fact is, Ultron is a clear and present danger and Bucky’s in the wind. We do mention the fact that that’s his sort of primary thing, but he’s also working with The Avengers too. We’re not ignoring it, but he definitely has to deal with a mad 8 foot robot, because that’s one of those things that you put it off and it just gets worse.

Perhaps we’ll see Cap mention that he hasn’t been able to track down The Winter Soldier early on? Obviously once the threat of Ultron is fully realized, Cap would of course focus his attention on that, but to Marvel’s credit they’ve done such a great job tying all of these plot strands together that I have little doubt the character motivations won’t make sense (unlike THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2). That also brings us to Black Widow. A stand-alone film has been teased in the past, but now there seems to be a little bit of pressure on studios to bring more female-centric superheroes to the big screen. One of the writers of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, Nicole Perlman, actually had tweeted a few tidbits of information on that front.

Scarlett Johansson has proved to be a charimatic Black Widow, and the character has certainly worked well within AVENGERS/THE WINTER SOLDIER, but I feel the big issue of a Black Widow film is budget. There’s no way in hell that a Widow film is going to bring in the dollars of an Avengers, which means that it would have a truncated budget in comparison to your typical Marvel flick. However, if WINTER SOLDIER proved anything, it’s that the quality of the action is relative to the story and characters. If you can make it compelling, I think audiences would be along for the ride. The Scarlett Johannson vehicle LUCY has grossed double it’s budget so far, so if anything, that should prove to Marvel that a Black Widow movie could be profitable if done right. I would love to see one that would really flesh out the relationship between her and Hawkeye. In the meantime we’ll have to settle for what we get in AGE OF ULTRON.

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON will be released on May 1, 2015.