An early version of Black Widow included Tony Stark

One of the biggest talking points going into Black Widow was whether it would feature a cameo from Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) — after all, it was set set soon after the events of Captain America: Civil War, long before Tony Stark died in Avengers: Endgame, so at least the timeline worked out. Ultimately, Stark was nowhere to be seen in the final movie, but the higher-ups at Disney did think about it. In fact, an early version of the script included him!

The rumor of Stark’s cameo in Black Widow was talked about for some time. It all came from a report by Deadline in 2019 which claimed that the Downey Jr. would “be seen in the role of Stark one more time.”

Speaking to ComicBook.com, Black Widow co-writer Eric Pearson revealed that, at one point, the script featured a scene between Natasha Romanoff and Tony Stark. That said, it was recycled content from Civil War. “I feel bad for the person who asked me this the other day because I said ‘there was never any discussion,’ but I do remember now that one version of the script prior to me literally had written into it ‘The end moment of Civil War with Tony and Natasha,’ but it was old footage.”

We all know the internet is great at taking rumors and shaping them into something much bigger than what they actually are. If it’s any consolation, the canned Iron Man cameo sounds pretty lackluster. Basically, the only purpose it served was to remind fans of when in the gigantic MCU timeline the movie took place:

"It would have been ‘Hey audience, remember where we are, we’re going to key off of this moment of her.’ So it wouldn’t have been Robert Downey Jr, at least to the best of my knowledge, that was the only time that I saw Tony Stark’s name in was just a flag planted reminder of ‘Hey we’re right at the end of Civil War.’"

Pearson is still bewildered to this day about how the report surfaced. “I don’t know where it came from unless somebody got a very old version with this kind of scene, which wasn’t even a new scene. I don’t know, I don’t know where (the report) came from.”

It just goes to show that most rumors that sound true might be false. Let’s hope the reports don’t miss the mark when it comes to Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire reprising their Spider-Man characters in Spider-Man: No Way Home. If that doesn’t happen, loads of expectant fans will be left very disappointed.

Even without an appearance from Tony Stark, Black Widow has been a big success at the box office. During the pandemic, it has become the fastest movie to cross $100M at the domestic box office the first six days, and also brought in a ton of money through Disney+ Premier Access.

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