How Hawkeye Producers Set the Series Apart from Marvel’s Disney+ Shows

November 21, 2021, 10:55pm

This holiday season, the best gifts come with a bow when Marvel unwraps Hawkeye. The fourth live-action original series from Kevin Feige’s Marvel Studios, the Christmas-set Avengers spin-off follows WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki as the next installment of Marvel’s Phase Four hitting the small screen instead of theaters. Teaming a retired Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) with rookie superhero but expert archer Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), Hawkeye is a street-level buddy cop comedy and Marvel’s first Christmas story since 2013’s Iron Man 3.

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After the reality-bending of WandaVision, the globe-trotting Falcon and Winter Soldier, and the Multiverse-breaking Loki, Hawkeye is about Clint trying to get back to his family on Christmas.

“As we were brainstorming and talking about the story a couple of years ago, we were trying to figure out how we can set this series apart from Wandavision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki. And one way was to set it around the holiday times,” executive producer Trinh Tran told The Hollywood Reporter. “Out of all of the characters, it made sense for Clint Barton’s story to be told around this time of year because he’s a family guy. He’s one of the few Avengers with kids, and after the fallout of what happened in Endgame — where he lost his kids for five years, became Ronin, and got them back — this is the first Christmas that he’s going to be spending with his family. And the big question of the series is if he’s going to be able to make it home in time in order to do so.”

When his past as the violent vigilante Ronin catches up to him in Hawkeye, he’s going to need help from skilled 22-year-old (and Hawkeye fangirl) Kate to unravel a criminal conspiracy and take on what could be an Avengers-level threat.

“There’s that big weight that he’s trying to figure out as he’s stuck elsewhere. He’s trying to deal with something that has put him on this mission and he has to figure out how to get out of it,” Tran said, adding of the lighter touch after Endgame: “We wanted to show a different side of Clint that we haven’t seen before, in comparison to all of the Avengers movies that he’s in.”

“And I find it so much more interesting that there is a version of Clint that is a little bit more humorous from the Matt Fraction [comic book] run,” Tran continued. “So we wanted to pull a little bit of that into the series, and we thought that Kate Bishop, out of everybody, was the perfect candidate in order to do so.”

Marvel’s Hawkeye premieres November 24 on Disney+.

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