A new Red Sparrow TV spots has dropped amongst a bit of controversy amongst Marvel fans over the movie. The first trailer for Francis Lawrence's Red Sparrow was released last year, and many MCU fans couldn't help but notice some striking similarities between the new movie and the origins of Black Widow. When the first Red Sparrow footage dropped, many called it the Black Widow movie we'd never see. However, it was announced last week that a Black Widow movie is in the very early stages of pre-production with Scarlett Johansson on board to reprise her role.

While talking to Screenrant, Red Sparrow director Francis Lawrence commented on the comparisons that many have been making to Marvel's Black Widow. While the basics of the story are very similar, the director promises that this is not a rip off in any way. Lawrence maintains that Red Sparrow is a thriller, not an action movie, citing the original source material to be the main difference. He had this to say.

"There's people who think it's very similar to the Black Widow story. This is not pulled from (Black Widow), this is pulled from Red Sparrow, you know, it's just like written by a guy who was in the CIA. It's like, his references are coming from a very very different place from that. But there'll always be that. People like to put things in boxes, and I think is a really unique film. This is a thriller, it's not action, again it's not gadgety. It's a hard-R. There's violence, it's a bit perverse, it's suspenseful, a lot of intrigue. It's a very different kind of spy film."

A close look at the trailer and the recently released TV spot for Red Sparrow does show off some striking similarities to casual observers. Both premises revolve around a young Russian woman being brutally trained to become a master assassin, which seems to flip the script afterwards. As Francis Lawrence maintains, that's where the similarities stop, and he would know. It just seems that the comparisons have gained a bigger audience thanks to the internet.

The new TV spot for Red Sparrow was just recently released and it features Jennifer Lawrence giving it her all in the new suspense thriller. Brief clips of her decision to join the Sparrow school quickly flash to training scenes that are appropriate for TV and are nowhere near as brutal as what we saw in the original Red Sparrow trailer. If anything, the movie looks exactly like something that fans of Marvel's Black Widow character will enjoy and something that her standalone movie might strive to be in terms of grit and suspense.

While Red Sparrow hits theaters on March 2nd, we're still a few months of way from seeing Black Widow on the big screen for Infinity War, which opens on May 4th. Now that it has been announced that the Black Widow movie is finally in the pre-production stages, many hardcore fans have wondered if the MCU will give her origin story the darkness that it needs, much like Red Sparrow. We'll just have to wait and see how all of that pans out, but as director Francis Lawrence says, the two characters are very different from each other. You can read the entire interview with Francis Lawrence through Screenrant.com and check out the new TV spot for Red Sparrow below.