Jessica Gao recently spoke to The Wrap where she finally revealed some interesting details about her Black Widow pitch. “It was basically a Grosse Pointe Blank story for Black Widow,” Gao said. “Basically you find out that in high school, as a teenage spy/Russian agent, she was planted at an American high school, because she had to assassinate someone’s dad and then 20 years later, she goes back to the high school reunion and has to deal with the fallout of this fake identity where she betrayed all these people in high school.”
It’s a far cry from what we ended up seeing in Black Widow. Still, there was something about the pitch that intrigued the guys at Marvel: it featured Jennifer Walters in a small role. Needless to say, that failed pitch led to Jessica Gao working on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. “I’m a big believer that every opportunity you miss is actually setting you up for something else,” Gao said. “I truly believe that I didn’t get any of those three Marvel movie jobs because it was building to this point. Because what it really did for me is every single time that I pitched to Kevin [Feige], and Lou [D’Esposito] and Victoria [Alonso], and Brad [Winterbaum], I get to spend an hour with him, and I get to shoot the shit and hang out and chat. Then I get to pitch my movie. Then, of course, they wholeheartedly reject me.” Gao continued, “But every time I would go in to pitch, it was like, ‘Oh, hey, what’s up? Is it the time of year where you reject me again? Cool. What have you been up to since you rejected me?’ It just really made the room very warm.” We’re glad that Gao never gave up and although we didn’t get to see Natasha Romanoff attend a high school reunion, we’re glad that the Black Widow pitch led to She-Hulk. The next episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law will air on Disney+ on August 25, 2022.
