Hayter: 'Canning 'Widow' was painful'

David Hayter has spoken of his disappointment after studio bosses pulled the plug on his Black Widow movie, based on the Soviet superspy comics character.

The X-Men screenwriter spent a year working on the script for the film adaptation after Marvel asked him to make his directorial debut on the project.

Writing in Tales from the Script: 50 Hollywood Screenwriters Share Their Stories, Hayter said: "Unfortunately, as I was coming up on the final draft, a number of female vigilante movies came out.

"We had Tomb Raider and Kill Bill, which were the ones that worked, but then we had BloodRayne and Ultraviolet and Aeon Flux. Aeon Flux didn’t open well, and three days after it opened, the studio said, 'We don’t think it’s time to do this movie.'

"I accepted their logic in terms of the saturation of the marketplace, but it was pretty painful.

"I had not only invested a lot of time in that movie, but I had also named my daughter, who was born in that time period Natasha - after the lead character in Black Widow. I named my daughter after a movie that I wasn’t working on anymore."

Black Widow is soon to appear in Iron Man 2, played by Scarlett Johansson.