If you’ve seen “The Substance” (the daring, strangely funny, and unbelievably gory body horror movie directed by Coralie Fargeat that scored an impressive number of Oscar nominations during this awards season), you probably can’t imagine how Fargeat’s wild vision could translate to something like, say, a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. Apparently, the House of Ideas wanted Fargeat to potentially helm the 2021 MCU movie “Black Widow,” and Fargeat turned it down — because she was already working on “The Substance.”
In an interview with Variety about her groundbreaking film, which earned star Demi Moore her first Oscar nomination and first-ever competitive acting award when she took home a trophy at the Golden Globes early in 2025, Fargeat said she ended “preliminary” talks with Marvel over “Black Widow” because she was in the zone … and didn’t want anything to get in the way of her process.
“I held on so tightly during the making of the film and the difficult postproduction phase, when everyone wanted me to make it less violent, less excessive, less gory, less frontal. I knew that I had written this film to be more than — or at least at the same level as — what I’m denouncing in the film,” Fargeat told the outlet, saying that, in general, society is “still insanely violent for women and puts us in boxes” and we ultimately “create our own violence against ourselves.”
Coralie Fargeat passed on Black Widow to focus on The Substance — which got a lot of pushback from studios
Unfortunately for Coralie Fargeat, studios were, to put it kindly, intimidated by her extreme vision for “The Substance.” This even led to a direct dispute between Fargeat and Universal, which originally considered distributing the film. According to Fargeat’s interview with Variety, a few executives — two men and one woman, to be exact — at the studio demanded pretty sweeping changes. “I think the film must have titillated something in this gentlemen,” Fargeat quipped.
Fargeat, to be fair, doesn’t appear to resent Universal over the fact that it asked her to change her film and she refused, ending their professional relationship (at least, as far as distribution of “The Substance” goes). “I can’t go into that too much,” Fargeat simply replied. “I think it was as simple as it wasn’t a good match for what they wanted to do. They felt, I think very simply, that the gap was too big for them, how they sell films […]Â I also know there have been experiences that have been, and can be, much worse. In spite of everything, I was surrounded by kindhearted people who didn’t always believe in the film, but there was no malice.”
Before “The Substance” premiered to rave reviews at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival (a dream of Fargeat’s, as she told Variety), Mubi picked up the film, and the rest is history. For such a divisive and difficult to watch movie (in the best of ways), to say the least, it’s stunning that “The Substance” is such a big part of awards season … and it’s a testament to Fargeat’s vision and her commitment to preserving that.
Ultimately, it’s a good thing that Coralie Fargeat didn’t direct Black Widow
To be completely frank, it’s probably a good thing that Coralie Fargeat didn’t get involved with “Black Widow” … because the rollout of Scarlett Johansson’s only solo Marvel Cinematic Universe film was an absolute mess. It’s certainly not Disney’s fault that the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020 and shut down society for over a year, preventing people from going to movie theaters. Nevertheless, according to the lawsuit Johansson eventually filed against the House of Mouse, the studio assured her that the film would still get a theatrical release instead of going straight to its proprietary streamer, Disney+, yet the latter is exactly what ended up happening.
The lawsuit between Disney and Johansson was settled after just two months, but it was still an unflattering look for the studio (which, in the process, basically accused Johansson of being greedy and called her behavior “callous”), and it feels right to say that this experience would have left an auteur like Fargeat in a pretty bad place professionally. In the end, Fargeat didn’t direct “Black Widow,” and now, her passion project has been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. So, unlike “The Substance,” this story has a happy ending.
You can stream “The Substance” on Mubi now, while “Black Widow” is available to stream on Disney+.