Hawkeye Might Finally Get the Story He Deserves in 'Avengers: Endgame'
After years of inconsistency, can the Russos do right by Clint Barton?

Since his first cameo in Thor (2011), Hawkeyeâs been the single most mismanaged character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but all that seems poised to change in Avengers: Endgame. Returning as one of the few surviving heroes, heâll even have a cool new haircut and vigilante identity as Ronin. After that, Clint Barton will get his own Disney+ series, but before that happens, it seems heâll finally get a decent story in the next MCU film.
As is the case with most non-supers in the Avengers lineup, Clintâs been relegated to either sidekick status or reserved exclusively for big team-up movies. In later films, he had a somewhat humanizing effect on the wider team, but we havenât seen Hawkeye since 2016âs Captain America: Civil War where he played a significant but somehow minor part. Many of us were downright confused by his absence in Avengers: Infinity War.
Most of Hawkeyeâs existence in the MCU so far has been riddled with contradictory character moments and lame puns that either focus on his bird-themed superhero persona or his precision with a bow and arrow. Heâs a living, breathing parody that fights alongside gods and characters with their own origin movies. Itâs a crying shame that the MCU underutilizes the excellent Jeremy Renner in the role.
âYou have to be a smart fighter when you donât have superpowers, thatâs what makes him sort of super in a way, I guess,â Renner said in 2015. âHe has to use his mind as much as his physical ability, and his ability to never miss.â
Is he a deadly assassin that never misses his mark? Is he a dad that just wants to build his baby a new crib? If Marvel Studios wants him to be both, then they need to do a better job convincing us.
In the final days before Avengers: Endgame, Inverse is celebrating some of our favorite heroes who never got their own standalone adventures. By tracing their evolution over the course of Marvelâs 22-movie tapestry, we hope to reveal something new about these underrepresented characters and the Marvel Cinematic Universe at large. Plus, itâs a fun new way to rewatch the 11-year saga. Along with this story, you can read Jake Kleinman on Black Widow and Eric Francisco on Rocket Raccoon.
Thor and Hawkeye fighting side-by-side in 'The Avengers'.
Thor Bungles the Introduction
Hawkeyeâs Thor cameo is almost laughable. When Thor invades a S.H.I.E.L.D. pop-up base built around Mjolnir, Agent Coulson calls for âeyes up high with a gun.â We see a pair of hands touch a sniper rifle. The figure hesitates and instead grabs a bow. He hops into a small platform suspended from a crane and takes aim, offering to slow Thor down â but he doesnât.
Why even include Hawkeye here if he never takes a shot? By Captain America: Civil War, we learn that Clint is as adept at hand-to-hand combat as pretty much anybody else in the MCU. Wouldnât it make more sense for him to just walk right up to Thor firing arrows? Or better yet, to use a trick arrows to incapacitate the god of thunder?
Hawkeyeâs appearance feels more like a cheap and gratuitous cameo, and it distracts the viewer enough to ruin what little good Thor has to offer as a story. Hawkeyeâs first appearance in a Marvel movie barely even registers, but it also manages to set the tone for his entire MCU career, one of confusion, mixed messages, and an identity crisis.
Giving Clint the hero pose here doesn't quite feel like enough in 'The Avengers'. And I thought he was out of arrows?
The Avengers Doesnât Know What to Do With Clint
For all the praise The Avengers gets as a groundbreaking entry in the MCU (itâs still the third-highest grossing Marvel film ever), the story fails its lesser heroes. Black Widow, Hawkeye, and even Captain America feel less significant when surrounded by characters that can fly and/or punch giant space whales right in the face.
Partially because he never got a standalone movie, itâs hard for the viewer to care about Hawkeye like they do the other Avengers. Here, he and Black Widow are just fairly generic spies. Especially when Clint spends most of the movie under Lokiâs mind control, we never come to understand what drives him beyond being a âbadass S.H.I.E.L.D. agent that likes archery.â
When heâs presented as a minor villain in this way, not only do we not care about him as a character, but weâre vaguely irritated by his very existence, especially when the groan-worthy dialogue keeps coming. What does the Tesseract show him, Loki wonders? âMy next target,â Clint says.
âAt the end of the day, 90% of the movie, Iâm not the character I signed on to play,â actor Jeremy Renner told the LA Times in 2012. He called the role ânot even a bad guy, because thereâs not really a consciousness to him.â
Had we known enough about Clint Barton to care, it mightâve been different, but instead it feels like a misstep. Hawkeye could have been a great minor villain in The Avengers. Instead, heâs just a distraction. Marvel didnât care about this character compared to the more impressive heroes.
Their relationship comes across as a little too intense in 'The Avengers'.
The nature of his relationship with Black Widow also feels intense and confusing. Loki is right to ask her if itâs love, but when she responds by saying she owes him a debt, it just feels like spy-themed melodrama. Yes, Barton made the call to recruit Black Widow rather than assassinate her, but there isnât enough emotional real estate to go around in The Avengers for us to care.
Hawkeyeâs later able to suit up for the Battle of New York, and even though he makes some superhuman shots, he literally runs out of arrows and feels like a bit of a joke. (Enough that Saturday Night Live lampooned this very situation when Renner hosted the show in 2013.)
Hawkeye at the opening battle of 'Avengers: Age of Ultron'.
Avengers: Age of Ultron Finally Letâs Hawkeye Shine
"Iâve done the whole mind control thing. ⊠Not a fan! â Clint Barton
If Hawkeye gets one decent story in the MCU, itâs Avengers: Age of Ultron â ironically everyoneâs least-favorite Avengers movie. Just as Captain America: Winter Soldier overcompensates to make Cap look like a cool badass all over again in the wake of The Avengers, Age of Ultron does the same with Hawkeye by aggressively course-correcting and making Barton sort of immune to mind control.
When all his teammates fall for Scarlet Witchâs mind control gimmicks, Barton is there with a cool quip and a taser arrow to the forehead. âIâve done the whole mind control thing,â he says. âNot a fan.â There were better opportunities to make Barton cool again, and Hawkeyeâs real superpower in Ultron is being the emotional core of the Avengers team.
But not before he takes some good ribbing at the hands of his the other Avengers.
âPretending we need this guy really brings the team together,â Black Widow says after Barton takes a hit on the battlefield and is patched up. Stark jokes about him dying, and then later at the party, he makes another joke about Barton not being able to âget it up.â (Ultron is easily the MCUâs most risque entry, by the way.)
âThereâs some wonderful secrets and relationships deepen, so thereâs a lot more of him to deal with versus the hypnotized version of him,â Renner teased about his role to Collider in 2015.
Hawkeyeâs humanity becomes more obvious when we find out heâs a loving husband and a father in secret. Stark makes jokes that his wife and kids are all spies â he canât believe it, and neither can we â but Barton just puts on a bigger flannel and has a heartwarming chat with his wife. He even calls the Maximoff twins âpunks,â as if the same badass archer from Thor has somehow become a wizened old curmudgeon in a few short years.
On some narrative level, transforming Hawkeye into a noble, self-aware hero works. Heâs a dad, so it makes sense that heâs able to give Scarlet Witch a humbling pep talk on the battlefield in Sokovia and later sacrifices himself to save a little boy â only to then be saved by Quicksilver. This is the kind of stuff dads do, but with the ensemble of Ultron and its apocalyptic stakes swarming around him, the movie doesnât do enough to really earn this new Hawkeye.
Clint Barton feels different in every single scene across the MCU.
There are great moments that make us love Hawkeye, but they come off as totally bewildering when his personality feels so inconsistent, perhaps because Marvel exerted a tighter grip on Age of Ultron than other films and clashed directly with director Joss Whedon.
âThe dreams, the farmhouse, these were things I fought to keep,â Whedon told Empire Film Podcast in 2015, talking of how he fought to explore Bartonâs family and the mind control sequences for everyone else. Whedon was forced to include a cave sequence where Thor identifies the Infinity Stones, laying the groundwork for the future of the MCU. âWith the cave, it really turned into: They pointed a gun at the farmâs head and said, âGive us the cave, or weâll take out the farmâ â in a civilized way.â
For Whedon, the entire middle sequence on the Barton farm is about humanizing the Avengers and showing that despite everyone thinking that Hawkeye has a dark side, itâs instead that heâs totally normal. âHeâs normcore,â Whedon said to Buzzfeed. âHawkeyeâs dark secret being that he doesnât have a dark secret is among my favorite things weâve ever done.â
But his behavior up to this revelation is absolutely bewildering. Does that make him a good spy? Or does it make somebody at Marvel bad at stories?
Clint Barton is the guy at the party who casually twirls drum sticks, even when there isnât even a drum set in the building. Heâs the guy who does weird voices to make fun of Thor. He wears a flannel and a leather jacket. He never sits on a chair.
At the beginning of Age of Ultron, he comes across as a too-cool-for-school bro. By the end of the movie, heâs the most likable dad in the entire universe. Itâs just too bad that Ant-Man came out a few months later, and everyone started loving Scott Lang more than Clint Barton.
Hawkeye stands for Team Cap in 'Captain America: Civil War'.
Captain America: Civil War Brings Barton Out of Retirement
If Age of Ultron taught us that Hawkeye was a dad, Captain America: Civil War revealed that heâs getting too old for this shit.
Clint Barton comes out of retirement for 15 minutes in Captain America: Civil War, harping on about âa debtâ he owes to Wanda Maximoff that just feels like a recycled version of Black Widowâs line about him in The Avengers.
Regardless, Steve Rogers recruits Hawkeye to get Scarlet Witch out of the Avengers facility and join up with Team Cap in Germany, but to do so, Barton has to foolishly take on Vision. Watching the weakest Avenger fight arguably its strongest is kind of hilarious, but itâs rescued by Scarlet Witchâs shocking ability to subdue Vision.
He doesnât do much during the airport fight sequence other than get his butt kicked by Black Widow and then Black Panther, but his greatest confrontation is with Tony Stark as these two quipsters quibble about golf jokes.
Tony Stark: Clearly, retirement doesnât suit you. You got tired of shooting golf?
Clint Barton: Well, I played 18, I shot 18. Just canât seem to miss.
We get it. He has great aim.
Barton is positively irate at Tony Stark after he and the rest of Team Cap are imprisoned, raving and calling him âThe Futurist.â He doesnât actually say anything coherent and just reacts with anger, and that doesnât bode well for what happens next.
Hawkeye in an 'Avengers: Endgame' poster.
Avengers: Endgame Will Give Ronin a Reason to Fight
"After the whole Accords situation, he and Scott took a deal. It was too tough on their families, theyâre on house arrest. â Natasha Romanoff, Infinity War
Potential spoilers for Avengers: Endgame follow.
Like Ant-Man, Hawkeye was missing in action for Infinity War, and though Scott Lang got all of Ant-Man and the Wasp to explain his absence, Clint Barton will probably only get the opening scene of Avengers: Endgame.
On April 15, a select few people in South Korea claimed to have seen the first 20 minutes of Endgame, and if these Reddit leaks are true, the opening of Endgame will justly explain what happened to Hawkeye during and after the events of Infinity War.
Iâd once hoped that Ant-Man and the Wasp or Captain Marvel might feature a scene where Barton watches his entire family die in Thanosâ Decimation. Now it seems like itâll happen at the very start of Endgame before he assumes his new Ronin persona and rejoins the Avengers in their final mission.
By giving Hawkeye a greater slice of the emotional real estate in Avengers: Endgame, maybe the Russo brothers can finally do something interesting with a hero thatâs never done anything consistent whatsoever in the past 21 movies. Then again, given the MCUâs track record, we may have to wait for his Disney+ series before Clint Barton ever becomes a fully-developed character.
Avengers: Endgame will be released in theaters on April 26, 2019.
Remember that time Jeremy Renner made fun of Hawkeye with a song on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon?