Hawkeye star Jeremy Renner is itching to suit up and join the fight in Avengers 4.
“Got this feelin I need to SUIT up soon,” Renner wrote in an Instagram post published Saturday night accompanied by a shot of Hawkeye armed and ready with his bow. Renner included the hashtags “coming in hot,” “miss my friends,” “love my family,” “marvelous,” “hawkeye,” and “nest unknown.”
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The Avengers star famously sat out Avengers: Infinity War, after family man Clint Barton was sidelined by a house arrest deal after illegally assisting Captain America (Chris Evans) and defying the government-mandated Sokovia Accords in Captain America: Civil War.
Hawkeye’s notable absence from early Infinity War promotional materials was “one of the best things that ever happened to Hawkeye,” Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige told io9 just before the release of the crossover epic in April.
“We [at Marvel] love Hawkeye. There are big, big story things coming up for Hawkeye and Jeremy Renner is as strong an actor as anyone in the MCU and awesome as this character,” Feige said.
“But ‘The guy with the bow and arrow jokes’, right? There are a lot of ‘Guy with bow and arrow jokes.’” He even makes ‘Guy with a bow and arrow’ jokes in some of the movies. So I love that people go from ‘Oh, Hawkeye is just lucky to be there,’ to ‘Oh, where is he? He’s not there? What’s going to happen? We need Hawkeye. We want more Hawkeye.’ I love it. It’s the best.”
The eagle-eyed Avenger is just one of a handful of characters not to appear in the universe-wide crossover event, which brought together much of the shared Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time, merging the world of the Avengers with Spider-Man, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, and the Guardians of the Galaxy.
Officially, Barton retired before the events of Infinity War: the father of three announced his exit from the superhero game in the Infinity War Prelude comic book, resigning himself to a simple farm life.
Renner is expected to don the identity of Ronin in Avengers 4, the same masked identity Barton assumed for a time in modern comic books. Barton could be out to avenge the fallen among Earth’s mightiest heroes, victims of Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) snap that annihilated half of all life in the universe — and odds are he could be mourning the loss of some or all of his immediate family post-snap.
Avengers 4 opens May 3, 2019.