Following the fallout related to the Sokovia Accords, Romanoff became a fugitive and eventually reunited with her adopted family, including sister Yelena Belova.

in Ohio, the family escape to Cuba where they rendezvous with their boss, General Dreykov, who has Romanoff and Belova put through the Red Room for further training to become assassins.

After Fury reactivates the "Avengers Initiative", she goes to Kolkata and recruits Bruce Banner to use his expertise to track the gamma signature of the Tesseract.

Rogers, Stark, Romanoff, Barton, Thor, and Hulk assemble as the Avengers in defense of Loki's next target, New York City.

was founded after World War II, Hydra has secretly operated within its ranks, sowing global chaos with the objective of making humanity surrender its freedom in exchange for security.

Later, to prevent Hydra from using three Helicarriers to murder millions, Romanoff, disguised as a World Security Council member, disarms Pierce.

Soon after, Romanoff recovers a Hydra file on the Winter Soldier (who is revealed to be Bucky Barnes) and gives it to Rogers and Wilson before leaving.

In 2015, Romanoff and the other Avengers attack a Hydra facility in Sokovia where they recover Loki's scepter and encounter Wanda Maximoff and her twin brother Pietro.

She and the team go to Johannesburg to stop Ultron, but Maximoff subdues Romanoff, causing her to see visions of her time at the Red Room.

She, Rogers, and Barton travel to Seoul to stop Ultron from transferring his network into a vibranium body powered by the Mind Stone.

Following their victory, she and Rogers form a new team in upstate New York at the Avengers Compound consisting of Wilson, Rhodes, Maximoff, and Vision.

Romanoff succeeds in securing it, but Maximoff mistakenly kills Wakandan humanitarian workers while protecting Rogers from Rumlow's suicide bomb, triggering the passage of the Sokovia Accords, giving the United Nations command of the Avengers.

She comforts Rogers after Peggy Carter's funeral and is present in Vienna where the accords were to be ratified and survives the bombing that kills Wakandan King T'Chaka, T'Challa's father.

She initially sides with Stark who supports the accords, accompanying him with Rhodes, Vision, T'Challa and Peter Parker to subdue Rogers's team consisting of Barnes, Barton, Wilson, Maximoff, and Scott Lang at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany.

Romanoff and Belova break Alexei Shostakov out of prison, and connect with Melina Vostokoff, before being captured and returned to the Red Room.

Romanoff accesses the control desk and copies the locations of the other Widows worldwide to a portable drive just as the facility begins to explode and fall from the sky.

In 2018, Romanoff, Rogers, and Wilson arrive in Edinburgh to defend Maximoff and Vision from Corvus Glaive and Proxima Midnight, two of Thanos' adopted children.

She tells Rhodes to keep looking for Barton, who lost his family in the Blip and spent the last few years killing members of organized crime across the world.

She and Rogers are astonished when Lang, whom they believed had disappeared, arrives at the Compound and tells them that he has been trapped in the Quantum Realm, a place where time passes differently.

[2] Black Widow was originally created as a comic book character named Natasha Romanova, first appearing as a recurring, non-costumed, Russian-spy antagonist in the feature "Iron Man", beginning in Tales of Suspense #52 (April 1964).

Her government later supplies her with her first Black Widow costume and high-tech weaponry, but she eventually defects to the United States after appearing, temporarily brainwashed against the U.S., in the superhero-team series The Avengers #29 (July 1966).

[16] In January 2009, Marvel entered early talks with Emily Blunt to play Black Widow in Iron Man 2,[17] though she was unable to take the role due to a previous commitment to star in Gulliver's Travels.

[18][19] In March 2009, Scarlett Johansson signed on to play Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow, with her deal including options for multiple films.

"[47] Following the development work done and the public support for a Black Widow film to be made, Marvel ultimately decided that the "best time to move forward with the project" would be at the beginning of the "latest phase" of the MCU in 2020.

[50][51] Cate Shortland had the backing of Johansson, a fan of the director's previous female-starring film Lore (2012), and was hired in July to direct Black Widow.

Despite The Hollywood Reporter confirming the amount from "multiple knowledgable sources", Marvel Studios disputed the accuracy of the numbers while stating that they "never publicly disclose salaries or deal terms.

[68] Anthony Russo noted Romanoff's torn allegiances in Captain America: Civil War, saying "her head is with Tony's side of things, but her heart is with Cap in a lot of ways.

[7] Vanity Fair described the development of the character across the films as "a trajectory that's been as all over the map as Black Widow's varying hairstyles", stating that she "spent her years in the MCU as an accessory to narratives foregrounding other heroes".

[84] Vox notes that in Avengers: Endgame, "Johansson takes Romanoff — usually the dependable, no-frills assassin — into quiet, stoic suffering",[85] while Vanity Fair laments that the film "never gives her or her death room to breathe".

[86] Eric Kohn of IndieWire praised the action, "notably during a brawl between Black Widow and the robotic killer known as Taskmaster who mirrors her every move.