Black Widow is finally out, solving the mystery of who the Taskmaster is after multiple trailers and a year's worth of delays.
But the final film actually started another mystery: what happened to that Robert Downey Jr cameo that was reported back in 2019?
Director Cate Shortland recently said that she "initially discussed" the idea with Kevin Feige, but decided against it. But now it turns out that plans for it were temporarily more concrete than that, with co-writer Eric Pearson stating that the script did at one point feature some previously shot footage.
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Speaking to ComicBook.com, he said: "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.
"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.'
"I remember when those rumors came out, I was in London in our War Room office and I just looked around and was like 'Are we? Am I supposed to be? I have the script right here, Tony Stark's not in it.' Everyone was like 'No, no.'
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"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."
Tony Stark will definitely be appearing in an upcoming project, that being Marvel's What If...? on Disney+. Although a lot of MCU actors have returned to voice their roles again, it doesn't look like Robert Downey Jr has.
Black Widow is out now in UK and US cinemas, and is also streaming on Disney+ with Premier Access.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he's covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I'm a Fish.
