Long before Natasha Romanov joined the Avengers as Black Widow, she was one of the best spies and assassins in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Next year, Black Widow will give audiences a closer look at the life of Scarlett Johansson's Avenger, including her time training at the Red Room, which forged her into one of the deadliest people in the MCU.

While the Red Room is surrounded by the mystery that envelopes any good spy organization, there's still a good amount of information about the Red Room that we already know. While the MCU's glimpses of Widow's training have been reserved and scattered, comics have explored her past and her time at the Red Room for decades. Now, we're digging into everything we know about the Red Room, both in comics and in the MCU.

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WHAT IS THE RED ROOM?

Black Widow Young Red Room Comics

While the Red Room has been part of Black Widow's history for years, it wasn't really deeply explored until Black Widow started starring in her own series in the late '90s and '00s. In short, Department X's Red Room Academy was the culmination of the Soviet Union's attempts to produce the world's greatest spies during the Cold War era. The Red Room specialized in taking young girls from birth and precisely and perfectly honing their minds and bodies for the tasks of espionage and assassination, regardless of the ethics that went into producing such high caliber soldiers.

Part of the Red Room's process in the comics involves biochemical conditioning and experimentation that made all trainees immune to the effects of aging and disease while boosting their physical abilities and immune systems. A byproduct of the process was that all trainees were rendered infertile. Besides Romanov, the Marvel Universe's Red Room also saw Yelena Belova, the second Black Widow, and Nadia Pym, the current Wasp, train there, and Bucky Barnes was also an instructor there while he was the brainwashed Winter Soldier.

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THE RED ROOM IN THE MCU

Black Widow Red Room Scarlett Johansson

Most of what we know about the Red Room in the MCU comes from the flashbacks briefly seen in Avengers: Age of Ultron. During an intimate conversation with Bruce Banner, Natasha reveals that part of the Red Room's "graduation ceremony" involves a surgery that rendered its subject incapable of conceiving a child. Natasha's flashbacks hinted at her attempts to intentionally fail her training prior to the "ceremony," but she ultimately completed training at the Russian training base.

In other flashes to the MCU's Red Room, Natasha trains in ambidextrous target practice using a handgun and a target with a bullseye. As part of her training, that bullseye was replaced with a man wearing a bag over his head. Although Natasha initially hesitates to execute the man, she eventually takes her shot nevertheless.

Age of Ultron's flashbacks are not the only insight into the MCU Red Room's amoral training, either. Agent Carter featured another product of Soviet spy training, Dottie Underwood. The series' showrunners confirmed that the Russian Assassin Program was a precursor to the same Black Widow Program that Natasha ultimately underwent.  As a child she was forced to spar with her fellow trainees to the death, murdering those she thought of sisters at the behest of her masters. Hardened by her training, the villainous spy use several aliases and resort to any means necessary to complete her missions.

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Dottie Underwood Agent Carter

In Natahsa's case, the training could be as transformative mentally as it was physically, involving repeated viewings of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves intercut with subliminal messages to instill fear and pain. Black Widow also recalls torturous ballet lessons the girls were forced to endure. While that could've been used as a stamina and agility building exercise, those may be false memories that cover harsher forms of training, if the example set by comics to to be believed.

While ballet was an integral part of Natasha's background for years in the comics, she eventually uncovered that much of her history as a ballerina was actually just another layer to her brainwashing. The same biochemical conditioning that honed her body to perfect made her nauseated to think of the contradictions between training as a ballerina and training as an assassin. With that in mind, Natasha's own memories of her time in the Red Room can't really be trusted at all.

Regardless of what we already know about the Red Room, Black Widow will doubtlessly delve into what exactly happens at the Red Room. Alongside several clips of the Red Room, the trailer shows a reunion between Natasha and other likely Red Room graduates including Yelena, Melina Vostoff and the Red Guardian, a Russian super-soldier. While the MCU's Red Room is still shrouded in mystery, it won't be too long before its secrets are revealed.

Directed by Cate Shortland, Black Widow stars Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Florence Pugh stars as Yelena, David Harbour as Alexei aka the Red Guardian and Rachel Weisz as Melina. The film opens May 1, 2020.

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