WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Black Widow, now in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access.
Starring one of the most accomplished spies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Widow has plenty of nods to classic espionage cinema, especially the venerable James Bond franchise. Early in the movie, Natasha Romanoff is seen watching the 1979 Bond film Moonraker, with a climactic fight scene in midair serving as a nod to Moonraker‘s own aerial prologue action set piece. However, Black Widow also has one major allusion to the Bond series and one more integral to the film’s plot, with central antagonist Dreykov’s master plan directly echoing the scheme of the megalomaniacal villain Blofeld in the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
In Black Widow, Dreykov has been brainwashing trafficked women for decades to form a network of sleeper agents around the world. More than just the highly trained killers that Natasha and her sister Yelena Belova have since become, Dreykov plots to have his planted sleeper agents completely disrupt the global economy. This way, he can rise to power in the chaos he has unleashed, intent on winning the Cold War he and the Soviet Union lost over twenty years ago. While not quite as ambitious as Dreykov’s plans, Blofeld similarly instituted his own network of sleeper agents decades earlier, with similar goals and methodology.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service revealed that Blofeld had gone into hiding under a pseudonym, heading a clinic atop a remote mountain in the Swiss Alps. As Bond tracks down his old nemesis in his mountain hideaway, he learns that the clinic operates under the auspices of curing patients of severe culinary allergies, with the clinic’s patients exclusively being young women from around the world. Blofeld’s alleged cure is an intense form of mental conditioning, with the villain revealing he has completely brainwashed his patients with the instructions to return to their home countries and deploy a genetically engineered virus created by Blofeld himself. The virus will render crops sterile and upend the agriculture industry, unless the United Nations caves to his demands.
Dreykov’s plot is much more insidious, trafficking women from an early age, horrifically transforming them physically and brainwashing them to follow his every command. He trains them through both mental conditioning and genetic experimentation. Moreover, Dreykov’s control is more absolute, allowing him to force his victims to kill themselves while they maintain enough lucidity to be aware of what they are doing. And while Blofeld is aiming for a lifetime pardon of previous crimes and for his claim to European nobility to be legitimatized, Dreykov’s plans are much more catastrophic, planning to use his techniques to take control of world leaders as he rises to power from the shadows.
Dreykov and his plot aren’t just straight out of a Bond movie, they top the spy movie franchise’s most devious villain. Compared to the lengths Dreykov has gone and the scope of his plans, Ernst Stavro Blofeld seems like small potatoes and the kind of threat that Natasha and Yelena could’ve taken down in their sleep. In true MCU fashion, Black Widow highlights and amplifies spy movie tropes. In developing an evil plan concocted by the movie’s villainous mastermind, Black Widow turned to James Bond’s adventures for its own.
Black Widow is currently in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access. The film will arrive on non-Disney+ digital platforms Aug. 10 and on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD Sept. 14.
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