The fact that there will be a new episode of an MCU streaming series arriving on Disney Plus pretty much every week this year more than makes up for a Marvel-less 2020. After The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, What If...?, and Ms. Marvel, fans will be treated to a Hawkeye series starring Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton and Hailee Steinfeld as his successor, Kate Bishop. While the series should mostly focus on introducing Kate’s origin story and showcasing Steinfeld’s take on the character, it has an interesting opportunity to contrast the beginning of Kate’s story with the end of Clint’s.
James Mangold’s Logan gave Hugh Jackman’s iconic portrayal of Wolverine the perfect bittersweet swansong. The character finally stopped trying to outrun his past and sacrificed himself to ensure the survival of the next generation of mutants – it provided the perfect conclusion to Jackman’s two-decade X-Men arc. After the dark turn that Clint’s own arc took in Avengers: Endgame, Hawkeye has the chance to give him the Logan treatment.
After the opening scene of Endgame makes it clear that Thanos’ destructive finger-snap can’t be undone and the Avengers are forced to live with the massive ramifications of their failure, the movie takes a surprising five-year time jump into a dark 2023 where everybody’s lost so many people that they’re too depressed to move on with their lives. Clint, having lost his entire family when the Mad Titan put the Infinity Gauntlet on shuffle, is revealed to have taken on the mantle of “Ronin” and become a grizzled antihero determined to kill everybody who deserved to turn to dust more than his wife and kids.
While Tony spent those five years starting a family in the ruins of society, Clint spent those years murdering people to deal with the grief of losing his own family. Throughout Endgame, as he’s recruited by the reformed Avengers to help with the “Time Heist” that could bring everybody back, Clint shows real remorse for how he spent the interim. He’s ready to kill himself for the Soul Stone on Vormir because he feels like he deserves to die for what he’s done.
Clint will be in a very dark place following the events of Endgame. Laura and his kids are back, but he still has to live with the guilt of those five blood-soaked years. With Clint passing on the torch to Kate, he’ll be retiring from “that superhero life,” as Rhodey put it, and living out his days peacefully with his resurrected wife and kids – or, at least, that’s the plan. It’s possible that Clint will end up having the make the ultimate sacrifice, like Logan did, to save Kate and make sure she can live to fight alongside Earth’s mightiest heroes. After all, most of the MCU’s mentors (Yinsen, Dr. Erskine, the Ancient One etc.) end up dead. Death is a great redeemer, so such a melancholic bookend would effectively absolve Clint of his crimes as Ronin.
Marvel fans have never found Hawkeye to be a particularly interesting character, and have made no secret of it. He’s constantly referred to as the most useless Avenger, his most substantial storylines in the MCU were mundane in comparison to everybody else’s, and the observation that a team with a god, a super-soldier, and a giant monster doesn’t need a guy with a bow and arrow has become a tired joke. But thanks to movies like X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Jackman’s Wolvie had a pretty rocky journey to Logan. Mangold’s movie proved that it’s never too late to turn around an underwhelming superhero arc.
Just as Logan functioned as both an origin story for X-23 and a series finale for Wolverine, Hawkeye has the opportunity to conclude Clint’s entire MCU arc while beginning that of Kate Bishop. Clint may not be as exciting a character as Tony Stark or Steve Rogers, but he’s been an Avenger for just as long as them and his swansong deserves to be just as fitting as theirs in Endgame. With a real deconstruction of Clint’s role in the larger universe and his effectiveness as a hero (i.e. not Joss Whedon’s “None of this makes sense” bathos), the Hawkeye series can give his arc the kind of immensely satisfying conclusion that retroactively improves some of the shakier storytelling that came before.
The confirmed appearance of Lucky the Pizza Dog will surely result in a Baby Yoda-level phenomenon, but the Hawkeye series shouldn’t lose sight of Clint himself. Setting up Kate to take over the mantle of Hawkeye should be this show’s main priority as Marvel looks into the future – it’s likely that Kate will be a founding member of the MCU’s Young Avengers line-up – but with some sharp parallel storytelling, Clint’s “endgame” could complement the first steps of Kate’s journey and inform how she approaches fulfilling the duties of Hawkeye.