‘She-Hulk’ Creator Jessica Gao Reveals Her ‘Black Widow’ Movie Pitch and the Secret Origins of Trolling Kevin Feige

thewrap.com:

“She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” which just debuted on Disney+, is arguably the most delightful Marvel Studios series yet. Created by Jessica Gao and starring Tatiana Maslany as the lawyer-turned-superhero, “She-Hulk” is effervescent and refreshing, a balmy tonic after the darkness of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and other, more somber Marvel Studios productions.

Most of this is due to Gao, whose sensibilities are so perfectly suited for the character that you’ll wonder why she hadn’t done a Marvel project before.

As it turns out, she tried.In fact, “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” was spawned, in part, from a pitch she made to Marvel Studios for the “Black Widow” movie.

When TheWrap asked her about the pitch, she was reluctant, in case she wants to use elements of it for a future project. But she described it in broad strokes. “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.”How great does that sound?Gao met with Marvel Studios on a couple more movies (“Captain Marvel” and “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”) and while she never got them, it led to two things: “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” and Gao’s merciless trolling of Marvel Studios president and one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, Kevin Feige.“I’m a big believer that every opportunity you miss is actually setting you up for something else,” Gao said.