THE SUBSTANCE Director Coralie Fargeat Declined Marvel’s Offer To Helm BLACK WIDOW

When The Substance picked up five Academy Award nominations – including Best Director – during Sunday’s announcement, the usual jokes about director Coralie Fargeat immediately getting swept up in the superhero movie vacuum followed.

Now, it’s come to light that the filmmaker actually did come close to accepting an offer to helm a Marvel Studios project while she was still working on the script for her surreal body-horror satire.

In Variety‘s piece on Fargeat’s struggle to stay true to her original vision for the film despite certain Universal execs feeling that the extreme gore and nudity would make it a hard sell, it’s mentioned that the director walked away from preliminary discussions to helm 2021’s Black Widow starring Scarlett Johansson in order to stay focused on The Substance.

“I held on so tightly during the making of the film and the difficult post-production phase, when everyone wanted me to make it less violent, less excessive, less gory, less frontal. I knew that I had written this film to be more than — or at least at the same level as — what I’m denouncing in the film,” Fargeat says, adding that our society is “still insanely violent for women and puts us in boxes” to a point where we “create our own violence against ourselves.”

It may seem difficult to imagine the filmmaker behind The Substance and 2017’s brutal survival thriller Revenge taking the helm of a Marvel movie, but the reality is, had Fargeat accepted the offer, Black Widow probably wouldn’t have turned out all that different to the film Cate Shortland delivered.

Though some filmmakers (James Gunn, Sam Raimi) have obviously managed to bring their own unique flourishes to previous MCU projects, any level of creative control – which Fargeat insisted on with The Substance – would not have been entertained.

Now that Fargeat is an Oscar-nominated director, is there a chance she will decide to board more mainstream projects in the future? We’d say it’s highly unlikely!

Natasha Romanoff, aka 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.

Black Widow also stars Florence Pugh, David Harbour, O-T Fagbenle, Olga Kurylenko, William Hurt, Ray Winstone, and Rachel Weisz, and is now streaming on Disney+.