THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON To Rearrange Shooting To Account For Scarlett Johansson’s Pregnancy

As Fast and the Furious 7 and Hunger Games: Mockingjay show, tragedies wreak havoc on film productions. But joyous events can also cause turmoil in shooting schedules, as The Avengers: The Age of Ultron is now finding out.

It was announced yesterday that Scarlett Johansson, who plays Black Widow in the film, is expecting her first child with her fiancee, journalist Romain Dauriac. Since shooting has yet to officially begin with the principals on the sequel, this caused many to ask how Joss Whedon and company will handle the unexpected announcement.

According to E! Online, they’ll handle it by front-loading all of Johansson’s scenes so they are shot first. Production on Age of Ultron is set to begin on April 5th, and one assumes that Johansson will go directly from promoting Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which opens April 4th, right into filming her role in the sequel.

Believe it or not, there is a precedent for this. Last year, Halle Berry was pregnant while filming her role as Storm in X-Men: Days of Future Past and the production employed a similar “first in, first out” strategy with her scenes. However, Berry’s role had to be rewritten because her condition caused her to not be able to do the wire work necessary for flying and fighting. Every pregnancy is is different, and, speaking from second hand experience, there are more risks when you are pregnant at Berry’s age (45) than Johansson’s (29), but one has to wonder if similar rewrites will have to be done in Johansson’s case.