Avengers Endgame: THIS emotional Black Widow subplot was deleted ‘It was fascinating’

WARNING: Spoilers ahead for Avengers Endgame.

The record-shattering Marvel movie sees Natasha Romanoff sacrificing her life so that Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) can get hold of the Soul Stone – part of the Avengers’ efforts to bring back those lost to Thanos’s Snap.

But before that, once the film jumps ahead five years, we find Natasha holding the fort at Avengers HQ.

While her former cohorts have gone in different directions – Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is raising his daughter, Clint is off being Ronin, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is in a rut playing videogames – she is keenly keeping an eye on the world’s dilemmas, desperate to continue helping people.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo have now revealed that her 2023 pick-up was nearly a little different.

In Slate podcast The Gist, they explained that she was initially taking care of orphaned children, who had been left without parents by the Snap, but it never made the finished script.

“One thing that we talked about a lot – and I thought was really profound, but it was almost too large of an idea for us to wrangle, but we did try for a while – the idea that one-quarter of all children have no parents,” Anthony explained.

“Assuming you started with two parents,” Joe added.

“So that’s a lot of global orphans. Just the staggering number of that.

“I believe at one point really early in development, Black Widow was actually leading the organisation in D.C. that was in charge of orphans, basically.

“That was what she was heading up five years later. But yes, it’s fascinating when you start running it down.”

Black Widow is expected to be seen in her own prequel solo movie, although the details of that – and how it fits into the broader MCU – remains to be seen.

Asked about it outright on Jimmy Kimmel’s chatshow last month, she said playfully: “When, what? Where, when?

“That’s a lot of words. I don’t know. Too many words.”

For now, Avengers: Endgame is continuing to close in on Avatar in its bid to become the highest-grossing movie of all time.

Avengers: Endgame is out now.