The PG-13 rating for Black Widow is no surprise; it’s the same rating received by previous Marvel releases like the Iron Man Trilogy, Black Panther and the Avengers series. But this is a movie with more than just scenes of ‘cartoon violence’.

Black Widow earned the rating for “for intense sequences of violence/action, some language and thematic material.” “Intense” may be underselling it: viewers should be prepared for upsetting scenes, according to plot details shared by co-star Florence Pugh in the Marvel Studios’ Black Widow: The Official Movie Special Book, released in advance of the film.

“The storyline that we are telling is very horrifying. It’s about women that have been, essentially, abused and trained up to be killing machines [in the Red Room]. As Scarlett said over and over, this is the right time for her to be telling [Black Widow’s] story. And we’re not shying away from the fact that this story is essentially about women getting their life back.”

Set between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, the movie will see Natasha look back into her past when she had to train Pugh’s character in spy craft.

The 24-year-old Pugh plays Yelena Belova, who is a sister figure to Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff in the movie directed by Cate Shortland.

The most recent Black Widow trailer suggests that Natasha was initially inducted into a false family, with Red Guardian as her father, Melina Vostokoff as her mother, and Yelena Belova as her little sister. This is actually quite a typical approach for brainwashing someone; you begin by providing them with a place where they feel they belong.

While little was known of Natasha’s life before the Red Room, Avengers: Endgame revealed she never knew her father’s name, so she certainly never had a full family around her before.

Pugh noted that her character and Romanoff “repair one another and each other’s holes in their lives.”

Black Widow will have a simultaneous release on Disney+ and in movie theaters. It will be a Disney+ Premier Access title. It is expected to cost an additional $29.99 like both prior Premier Access titles, Mulan (2020) and Raya and the Last Dragon (2021).

The movie was recently moved from a May premiere to a July 9th opening, and fortunately for the film, it won’t be competing with Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, which was pushed to 2022 by Paramount.

Perhaps that is part of the reason that The Numbers, a film industry data website that tracks box office revenue, says that Black Widow is now tracking for a box office haul of roughly $170 million. It was expected to earn about $45 million if it had hit theaters in May. According to The Numbers’ latest projection, the Scarlett Johansson-led superhero film will take in about 3.77 times more, meaning the delay to July seems to be paying off.

Black Widow stars Johansson and Pugh, along with David Harbour as Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian, O-T Fagbenle as Mason and Rachel Weisz as Melina Vostokoff.