Hacker Cinema
Black Widow
2021 · Film · 134 min
Directed by Cate Shortland
ActionAdventureScience Fiction
Natasha Romanoff, also known as Black Widow, confronts the darker parts of her ledger when a dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past arises. Pursued by a force that will stop at nothing to bring her down, Natasha must deal with her history as a spy and the broken relationships left in her wake long before she became an Avenger.
3 positive8 negative14 neutralfrom 25 commenters
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25 comments on Hacker News
gpt-4o-audio-preview seems like a stealth preview release of the Advanced Voice API but using the old voices. I asked it to speak like Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow but it used a much stronger Eastern European accent than in the movies lol.
Here is @minimaxir playing with it:
https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1847025370694144135
I abide by these principles precisely. Didn’t always. I have a couple extras.
6. On the rare chance I offer advice without being asked, I always frame it as “here’s what I learned the hard way. Do you mind if I tell you how I screwed up in a similar situation?”
7. And then I hasten to tell the other party I won’t be offended if they ignore what I said. Unless it’s the fact that Scarlett Johansson deserved a much much better script for the Black Widow movie and deserves a Mulligan, which is an undeniable fact.
Mostly though I just listen because people almost never actually want advice, but they’re often in need of a good listener.
>This entire "zomg bad film + female character = woke mind virus!!11" is just silly.
Nobody is saying this. (Strong) Female main characters have been in many successful movies and video games before and nobody bat an eye, quite the contrary, they loved them: Sarah Connor - Terminator, Trinity - Matrix, Ripley - Aliens, Lara Croft - Tomb Raider, Blood Rayne, Salt, Black Widow, Lucy, Charlie's Angles, etc, I could go on and on, and I'm no movie/video games enthusiast to know all movies with female leads.
The big difference is that those females were always written as the main characters in their own stories from the start, whereas what Disney is doing, along with Gemini and other woke corporations, is they try to replace established male characters of beloved IPs with female leads in the worst way possible, by disrespecting the original character that made the franchise popular and shoehorning a fake Strong Girl Boss™ stereotype with no personality and no character arc in his place, and then when the movie inevitably flops they blame the CIS white male audience for being incels "unable to handle strong females".
Do you think people would go to see James Bond or Top Gun Maverick if they replaced the male lead with some female actress that's trendy right now? Or would they see Tomb Raider if they replaced Lara Croft with Tom Holland? You can try for diversity's sake of course, but the audience and bean counters might stop you.
I think you’re being kind of dim if you think that the digital nature of film has any relevance to physical distribution vs. digital streaming distribution tbh.
There is an obvious reason why studios have a vested interest in releasing directly to consumers and that is to cut out the theaters as a middleman.
Which is the entire reason we have the Paramount decrees to stop vertical integration of film studios and film distributors. Which is now being evaded by streaming services.
The contract I have in mind is Scarlett johansenn suing Disney for releasing Black Widow to streaming when her contract stated that would not happen.
I don’t think you fully appreciate the context as you haven’t seemed to acknowledged some basic big moving pieces like Netflix doing films that have substantially smaller theater presences and much higher direct to streaming outcomes. Not to mention the trajectory of film from movies to long form streaming television.
I think you need to read the articles and not just the headlines.
Eternals, Shang-Chi, and Black Widow were all profitable movies. They were flops for Marvel considering that the majority of its movies are huge blockbusters that come close to or surpass the $1b mark, but any other studio would have loved to have a "flop" like Shang-Chi. And considering that all 3 came out during the pandemic when movie attendance was severely depressed around the world, $400m is an amazing number. (For comparison, Godzilla vs Kong made approximately the same box office as these 3 films, had the same sized budget including marketing...and is considered a huge success.)
This explains what happens when you factor INFLATION in. https://screenrant.com/ant-man-wasp-quantumania-box-office-m...
I don't understand what you're trying to say with this reference? At any rate, The Incredible Hulk predates the Disney acquisition of Marvel (TIH was released by Universal) and is the last Marvel film not to make a profit at the box office.
https://www.investors.com/news/disney-earnings-disney-stock/
> The Dow giant still expects Disney+ to be profitable in 2024.
Disney+ isn’t profitable once you take into account “transfer payments”. They may not be profitable at all yet. But they specifically mentioned being profitable including transfer payments.
That basically means that when Disney movie studios use to sell streaming rights to another company - say Netflix. They may make for instance $500 million (made up number). Disney+ still “pays” the Disney movie studio $500 million. It’s counted against Disney+ profits. Of course the Disney company as a whole keeps most of that money. But it still has to pay part of it to the actors, producers, etc who have a revenue share agreement.
It was a big point of contention when Black Widow was released.
Huh, I've personally enjoyed most everything up to Phase 4. The Phase 4 movies (other than Black Widow) have been pretty meh in my opinion. The Phase 4 tv shows have been pretty good, except for the fact that they mostly seem like build up for something else. I really enjoyed Hawkeye and I think Moon Knight is my other fav from this.
We see a ton of bad story telling, agreed. How women are protrayed is not among the reasons.
Disclaimer: I have been handled pretty easily by women in BJJ and kickboxing / boxing drspite being 20 kg heavier and a head taller. And I am not un-trained. Get over it, competent and strong women do exist.
Edit (because I have to get of my chest): The latest Dr. Strange is propably the best example of bad story telling I've seen in a long time. I quit the MCU after Black Widow (I like the character and Scarlett Johansson) and swore to maybe watch the next Thor, max. Until I saw Dr. Strange was already free on Disney+, and I needed some distraction. All that bad film did was making me not watch any MCU film ever again...
I think it's more about the stakes, obstacles, "psychic wounds" etc, than the actual superpowers. Being born with superpowers isn't that big a deal, if you're in a film where every other significant character also has superpowers.
Spider-man lets his uncle die because he's busy showing off. Batman in The Dark Knight "has no cartilage in his knees, scar tissue on his kidneys, concussive damage to his brain, and a host of other issues". Bruce Banner is subject to fits of uncontrollable rage. Logan is dying and in constant pain. Doctor Strange's hands are mutilated due to a car crash caused by his own arrogance.
IIRC Wonder Woman has a naivity due to growing up on a remote island populated by women, but she's basically confident and hypercompetent throughout. Captain Marvel's big issue is she's forgotten she has galactically important superpowers. Black Widow's character has a bit more going on, and I liked the film better than the other two. But, I think there is a difference between the amount of freedom big budget movie screenwriters have with male and female characters.
At lower budgetary levels, you're more likely to see women with less straightforwardly heroic characters, facing more interesting or engaging stakes.
Before Captain Marvel Brie Larson was doing great indie flicks like Room and Free Fire. She's said she was quite conflicted about taking the role, and I can't blame her for taking the money but I think I understand her hesitation.
Superhero movies aren't even cheap, is the sad thing. Dune cost less than Black Widow to make, and that's a fairly wide-scope space opera with lots of practical effects making up large amounts of the movie.
Everything has CGI from the most average TV show to biggest blockbuster and, for a lot of it, you don't even notice. What people complain about is the CGI that they do notice.
I think the issue is not, so much, that there is too much CGI. It's that a lot of movies are effectively hybrid live action and animated movies. And the animated parts tend to be way over the top to the point of being boring.
In Black Widow, the big 3rd act CGI explosion-fest was all planned out before the director even got involved with the movie.
I subscribe to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon (although that's just a byproduct of prime), and am happy to continue paying ~£30/month (which is roughly what a basic Cable package would cost me), and even pay the occasional £20 one off for a digital purchase of a "cinema" movie (see: Disney+'s recent releases, new bond movie etc).
However, when studios resort to pulling tricks like [0], artificially limiting content (john wick 2 is available on netflix, but to watch the first, you have to purchase it on another service), or just being fragmented (which of the 5 apps on my PC has the content I'm looking for?) I start to get super frustrated at the services, and if this continues will either likely just stop paying for the content, or look elsewhere. The content needs to be easily accessible in high quality or it's going to lose to piracy.
[0] https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a37170236/black-widow-scarlett-johansson-sues-disney-streaming/
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I can see her as a spoiled brat, especially after how she (or rather her people) framed this in the media. And at the same time I can see Disney as an evil corporation scamming people.
>I doubt very much they’d have done the same to Chris Evan’s or Robert Downey Jr.
Is this supposed to be about gender? Or what is this supposed to mean? Evans got less for the latest cape movie than Johansson got for Black Widow by the way ($15M vs $20M). She was in that same movie (Avengers: Endgame) and made the same as Evans.
Disney is an evil corporation, they will try to fuck with everybody if they think they can get away with it. I am sure if Avengers: Endgame was released now and in the way Black Widow was, they'd have tried to scam Evans and Downey Jr (and Johansson too) the same way they tried to scam Johansson now. Hollywood invented Hollywood accounting to scam people (and the state) long ago. One example of who got scammed this way is Stan Lee, who sued and got awarded $10M for Spider-Man from Marvel.
There sure is a lot of sexism in Hollywood, but this isn't it, as far as I can tell.
You can, but the total output is not the same as that ‘consumed’ and the importance in this context is the influence, not the sheer output.
For example, it could be that 10% of the films on that list are produced but never released (studio dumps, legal issues between producers and creatives, etc).
Just look at the USA box office impact of Black Widow, and Shang-Chi. Only two films but a huge proportion of post-covid box office revenue.
> I’d much rather be an elitist than go through life thinking comic books are the height of human expression.
Perhaps I'm too much of a child to understand your point, but this seems like a straw man.
I think the original contention was that MCU content is low quality (and no one has provided anything to support that claim beyond hand wavey "it's for children" nonsense). The other contention was that MCU films reduce the quality of the cinema industry overall, which is a similarly baseless claim.
Independent films still exist. Dramatic films still exist. Artistic production still exists. I haven't seen stats, but I would be shocked if the market for such content is smaller now than it was in 2008.
There's the possible claim that MCU sucks the oxygen out of the room for more artistic productions. I think the idea is that the world would be better if popular content didn't exist, so that we'd all have only "artistic" content available. I think that is a world in which fewer people watch movies at all, not a world in which everyone is driven to only appreciate high art. Thus the claims that MCU reduce the quality of cinema overall seems hard to defend.
I'm curious about the other perspective, so any perspective or analysis that better explains the thinking would be helpful. Otherwise I have to assume folks are just coming up with stories to justify their elitism.
BTW: "theme, meaning, film making craft, and artistic merit"
- craft was addressed in all of the sub-categories listed: performance, visual art, music, audio, effects
- theme/meaning: varies by film (because they aren't all the same). Sometimes it's loss and grief. Sometime's it's managing conflicts. Sometimes its reckoning with the inherent conflicts in heroism. Sometimes it's displacement after war. Sometimes it's about the forces that drive people to extremism. IDK humans aren't that complicated.
- artistic merit: a bullshit concept and I think you know it. Literal urinals have artistic merit. Canvases painted red have artistic merit. "Artistic merit" is elitism in distilled form.
Edit: I will concede that the performances in "Black Widow" were particularly weak.
> Why would streamers pay $30 for premiere access, when you can go to theaters (pre-covid) for ~$12 with a better experience?
$30 for the household, a one-time cost. For one person it's a no-brainer, theater is cheaper unless it's a long drive away. With 2 people it's probably cheaper to go to the theater depending on distance and whether you get concessions. With 3 it's break even depending on theater costs in your area and assuming you don't get concessions. With 4 or more, the $30 price is definitely better outside of a few lower cost of living areas (if they even have a theater nearby). And you can rewatch it throughout that premier access period. Though that's less applicable to Black Widow, versus movies aimed more at small kids.
> But for Disney, “Black Widow” has been seen as a success, given that the company also released the picture on its Disney+ streaming service for a $30 surcharge. Disney says the movie generated more than $60 million in digital sales this way, reflecting viewership of at least two million households over the opening weekend.
Why would streamers pay $30 for premiere access, when you can go to theaters (pre-covid) for ~$12 with a better experience?
Disney: Hype, take advantage of brand loyalty to make a quick buck, no substance
https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-widow-enters-a-gray-area-11627039800?mod=article_inline
The Black Widow movie actually addresses this.
Haven't seen Black Widow yet (I'm getting "wait 'till it's free" vibes), but opinions of Loki are... not universally good. I, for one, was skeptical about the other two shows and ended up loving both except for the last episodes (which was still OK for Wandavision, but outright bad in F&WS), while Loki was the one I was most interested in, but I've spent almost the whole time furrow-browed thinking "how is this so bad? How? Why did they make that choice? Why is this scene still going on?"
What's best and what's worst in Marvel tends to draw opinions that are all over the place, excepting that rarely does anyone rank the two Guardians movies near the bottom. Like Star Wars, I guess. You can get rankings that are wildly different, except for a few things (almost no-one is going to rank Empire very low, and almost no-one is going to rank AOTC higher than the middle, for instance).
The business of running movie theatres is what he is talking about and it's certainly changing.
In Denmark the movies Godzilla vs. Kong, Nomadland and Black Widow will not be shown in major cinemas.
The reason is that Warner Bros. and Disney (Marvel) have either shortened the exclusivity period (Warner Bros) or set the streaming premiere at the same day the movie airs in cinemas (Disney).
The core of the issue is that the cinemas have to pay the same amount although the terms are clearly worse.
I can't help but think that the loss in sales of merchandise will take a hit, but i could be wrong and things will continue as they are now.
Almost after 2 years of original release date, Disney+ is going to bring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt’s family-friendly movie Jungle Cruise to the theaters this summer. As like other movies Mulan, Raya, and The Last Dragon, Black Widow you can easily enjoy this film from home only. This is because Disney+ has officially announced that the movie is going to hit the streaming platform on the same day as theaters.
With the caveats that I'm not trans and I haven't looked into the game much beyond reading takes like this, I'll give my interpretation. I think there are a few issues at play, some more nuanced than others.
The first (and most black-and-white) is that CDPR's social media presence has been very… trolly. For example, "did you just assume my gender" is not something I've ever heard a queer person say; it's an anti-woke joke at their expense aimed at people who disdain the notion of gender fluidity. These, I think, color the rest of CDPR's conduct; there are other things that might be considered benign if not for their consistent trolling here.
> The criticism of the character creation surprised me: sure it could be better, but is it not also the most embracing version created yet in any AAA videogame that we known of.
The cynical take is that CDPR is exploiting the issue; they know that this is a popular topic right now and they're appropriating it in order to sell a video game. But even if you assume good faith on the part of CDPR, I think this is a case of intentions not mattering. Ultimately this game is going to be played by a lot of people, and help shape how many of those people see trans issues, and trans people are unhappy with the impression the game will leave.
I also observe that people often use "at least they/we are trying" as a way to evade criticism — even constructive criticism — which makes it hard to move forward. Like, are you only supposed to engage with people that are already hostile?
> Same with the poster: is it not cool to have a buff trans protagonist - they are objectified, but that is the point of posters (see captain america or black widow posters).
Objectification isn't binary; there are plenty of ways to highlight conventionally attractive features, which is why you see films like Wonder Woman lauded for their representation while characters like Black Widow are criticized for superficially similar portrayals. And of course criticism refers only to a consensus; there will always be people who are offended at benign representation and others who are fine with flagrant stereotyping.
Ultimately, I think the author knows that AAA titles are made by teams of hundreds of people, many of whom are trying to make a progressive game. But whatever the creators' intentions, when all is said and done the game and marketing thereof will look how they look, and people will feel how they feel about it.
It'll be interesting to see how this effects a culture/mindset shift among large movie producers and directors. Putting aside their artistic concerns that their films are best experienced on the massive widescreen, having a big box office haul seems to be a key part of Hollywood braqfests.
If simultaneous theater+streaming becomes the norm, it would seem the days of multi-hundred-million box office gross will be past. In 2020, the highest grossing film (domestically) so far is the Bad Boys sequel, which released in January and got $204M. The only other 2020 release to break $100M is the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. And many of 2020's top grossing movies were released in late 2019, e.g. "1917" and Star Wars. Even worse, Christopher Nolan's "Tenet" – released in September by Warner Bros – basically bombed at under $60M [0].
Given the huge movies that WB is planning to put on HBO (Matrix 4, Wonder Woman, Dune), I wonder if that'll spur Disney to throw Black Widow onto streaming. Apparently its Mulan release (which required a premium subscription) didn't do so well, but seems risky for Disney to sit on its hands while WB goes all in.
[0] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2020/?grossesOption=calendarGrosses
Dear MRAs, please try to lift the entire debate to a 20th century understanding, you are making me look bad.
To give a short primer,
Patriarchy: A social structure, which in modern discourse is largely influenced by work of Zetkin and Luxenburg around the WWI and leans on an analogy to Marxist classes. As such, it is notably not a conspiracy theory. The claim that there is no conspiracy is as uncontroversial as it is a straw man.
Gender: Social roles usually assumed to be correlated with biological sex. Note, if you want to claim gender does not exist, then you have to explain why Black Widow does wear high heels in the latest Marvel movie, while Iron Man does not. (Notably in the article the author confuses gender and sex, they are not synonym. One is about biology, one is about society.)
Toxic masculinity: To give an example, more men die in battle because the role of a warrior is clearly gendered as male. (That is, it is more acceptable for a man to become a soldier than for a women.) So there are aspects of expectations of man that are not helping. Another example is, more men die in car accidents because a man is expected to drive more aggressively than a woman. I have yet to see an interesting argument about toxic masculinity, that was not more eloquently argued by feminists in the 70ies. So stop whining about an unfortunate word choice. (See what I did there?)