Emily Blunt was a great, slightly offbeat choice to play the Black Widow in Iron Man 2. We were duly disappointed when Fox decided to exercise an option, left over from her The Devil Wears Prada deal, to put her in Gulliver’s Travels with Jack Black, leaving her no window to flirt with Tony Stark.
Now Nikki Finke reports on the replacement: the rumored Scarlett Johansson. Not only did she test for the role and not get it (maybe uh-oh, maybe not a big deal) but Finke reports that her deal for the film was amazingly bad. Mickey Rourke first-pass deal bad? (And Rourke got his deal upped.) Don’t know, and hopefully that won’t matter to us at all once the movie is playing.
Both Blunt and Johansson can play detached and sleepy, but Blunt is able to snap her performance into an energetic mode that Scarlett never seems to hit. I can too-easily see ScarJo just sleepwalking through this one, thinking she’s nailing ‘sultry’ the whole time. Two steps forward, one step back…