When Does 'Black Widow' Take Place in the MCU Timeline?
This article contains spoilers for Black Widow, the 24th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Fast and Furious series isn't the only mega-successful cinematic universe with a jumbled sequence of events that takes significant effort to parse with every new installment. In its very belated bid to give fans the first female member of the Avengers her own standalone filmsomething fans were clamoring for back in 2012, but less so in 2021Marvel Studios has at last released Black Widow, a Soviet-flavored spy adventure that calls Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) back to her roots in her quest to take down the Red Room, the espionage training facility that created her. More functionally, the movie introduces Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), who will presumably take over the Black Widow persona going forward. Black Widow is a swan song for a character that, weirdly, we've already said goodbye to. If you understandably can't remember what happened to her in the convoluted, time-travel yarn that was Avengers: Endgame, Natasha traveled with Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, back to 2014 in an attempt to retrieve the Soul Stone from the planet Vormir, and, in desperation to complete the mission that would help save Earth from suffering the modern day fate at the gauntleted hand of Thanos, selflessly leaped off a cliff to her demise to fulfill a requirement that the stone seeker, in this case Barton, must sacrifice a love one. Thus, for the purposes of the MCU, Natasha is dead for real, over, finito, meaning she's not one of the billions snapped out of existence by Thanos who later reappeared after the Avengers' time-travel gambit worked. (Of course, it's always wise not to count out future appearances of seemingly deceased characters in comic-book-related projects.) As usual, it helps to revisit the increasingly ornate timeline of the MCU.