Honestly, is Antonia even mentally competent to run a school?
She was horribly mutilated as a kid, then used as an experiment to turn her into a mindless killing machine.
I don't think Drekov taught her any skills that would enable her to teach. Or that Antonia is mentally an adult.
Plus like her skills do come from her device in her suit so I doubt she can teach at all.
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"Tony Masters proudly beaming and posing with his tony masters in education
Forever liveblogging the AvengersIf you mean Black Widow in general, in the comics Widow is tied up with SHIELD and the Marvel Universe’s spy game, so any enemy featured there could be used as an antagonist for future Widow movies in the future.
If you mean Taskmaster, basically any hero who fights hand to hand (or with a weapon) up to and including Spider-Man.
I’ve even been vaguely wondering, given that BW was supposed to come out last year, if we might even see Taskmaster again in Shang-Chi, since that’s a martial arts movie and pretty much the only part of the franchise currently on the docket that might make use of her abilities.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 16th 2021 at 10:43:20 AM
I just got back from seeing this movie, and it was quite good. ![]()
Reading the Pearson interview among a couple others and I do think Antonia works better compared to a strictly accurate 616 Tony Masters. Even if you gave him some sort of personal vendetta on top of the money he'd still be a distraction, a third-party tack-on forcing its way into the central conflict that is between Black Widow and the Red Room.
Taskmaster needs to be part of the Red Room...which could still work, tbh. In the movie's allegory for institutionalized misogyny we do already have Red Guardian as a man victimized by the system; one could work in Taskmaster as part of the vicious cycle of men being discarded and replaced with newer men who don't know better/think they can do different. You definitely lose the personal connection - Antonia is an Empty Shell but there's still a clear one-way My Greatest Failure connection from Nat to her that built up and paid off at the end, while this hypothetical Tony Masters would just be a fellow victim of the Room, and unlike Alexei, Nat's failed surrogate father, Tony would just be a guy. Not that it can't still work, it's just that's the trade-off.
One of the posts on one of the MCU subreddits highlighted that Antonia is actually more historically similar to minor Black Widow villain Recluse
, and between that, the interviews, and the end product it really does come off like Taskmaster is a result of Executive Meddling requiring this character be established for future use. And that ultimately really sucks, and it's apparent in how awkward the Taskmaster aesthetic is used in the film itself, but to the MCU's credit they've made a science out of fixing messes like this and if they're really sticking with this version of the character they've at least nabbed a solid actress like Olga Kurylenko to do it. So...we'll see I guess. :\
I fully expect Antonia Masters in whatever thunderbolts thing is clearly being built up
Edited by Bocaj on Jul 17th 2021 at 10:36:56 AM
Forever liveblogging the AvengersBW grossed $8.03 million on its second Friday.
Bro.
Edited by Mario1995 on Jul 17th 2021 at 10:57:46 AM
"The devil's got all the good gear. What's God got? The Inspiral Carpets and nuns. Fuck that." - Liam GallagherI feel very tempted to say that line in real life: "I'm allergic to the Midwest." XD ^_^;;
Come on! Let's bless them all until we get fershnickered!It's made $214 million so far according to wikipedia, including Disney+.
The rule of thumb is that its gotta do double that to make back the budget, pay for marketing, and turn a profit? Something like that?
Forever liveblogging the Avengers![]()
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She’s definitely coming back.
I can’t really imagine them replacing her cause bringing in a guy who can do everything she can do but better would bring in accusations of sexism.
So the only option is too keep using Antonia and hopefully improve on her.
Edited by slimcoder on Jul 17th 2021 at 1:14:48 AM
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."Saw the film. I enjoy it when it's trying to be more of a straightforward spy thriller with a fucked up family unit ("fucked up Incredibles" as Tucker poetically put it), but the whole Red Room shenanigans do end up troubling the film more than helping it. The third act in particular feels very detached from the more slow-paced family thriller before it. It ends up as a alright film dragged down by itself. It gets like a 6/7.
It's a side-effect, I think, of the film being a mandated single film given Widow is dead and they have a short time window (between civil war and infinity war) to do this story. So they just blaze through their ideas to wrap everything up in a single film. Had this been done before, they could have done something like a single film with the Widow family assembling and getting over their issues with Implacable Man Taskmaster (or some equivalent of it) as the main villain, ending with them finding a clue to General Ray Winstone to be more properly faced in a second film.
So basically, fuck Ike Perlmutter.
My thoughts on Taskmaster: I think there is some hope of retroactively making this character Finnesse and establishing that the real Taskmaster worked for the Red Room training their agents but quit after seeing what it really was, with Antonia as his replacement, and make Antonia's character arc to find him. Maybe make him her parental substitute in some fashion. It'd be a classic MCU maneuver (even Loki winked at a more comics-accurate Loki with Old Loki) and it'd give her something to actually do that's not Bucky redux.
PS: I was actually surprised at how great of a character the Red Guardian ended up being (and even more surprised he seems to be actually heroic and actually a socialist), and I felt the film did a disservice to itself by not giving him a big moment and keeping him as the Butt-Monkey in the entire runtime.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Eh, debatable. This is Brezhnev-era USSR after all, it was just a bunch of bureaucrats and mafia goons pretending to be socialist while negating Marxist-Leninist theory and rehabilitating other revisionists. At best I could see Red Guardian as having been on a more reformist end of the party prior to going to jail, given his comments about how Dreykov viewed the CPSU.
But this is just my dumbass self overanalyzing politics in media
I'm saying actually socialist (or communist) because of his comments. As he's being hauled in the helicopter he actually explicitly comments he fought "for the cause" and thought the Party had turned into a horrifying abomination he wanted to reform to better fight for the proletariat. Every now and then he alludes to the fact his motivation is primarily ideological. Just surprised me they even put that tidbit in given how rabidly terrified of socialism US media is (let alone the MCU).
"All you Fascists bound to lose."

I amusingly hope that most or enough of the Widows were snapped so they can stop holding Antonia back from becoming a merc, assuming she wasn't snapped during the 5 year time-skip.
Presumably they want a normal nonviolent life which is fine for them, but Taskmaster's got a grander destiny than being some normal person.
Ain't a good thing to waste a person's potential.
Edited by slimcoder on Jul 16th 2021 at 3:54:32 AM
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."