Marvel’s Hawkeye Director Teases Florence Pugh’s Black Widow Return on Disney+

Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) is aiming for Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) on Marvel’s Hawkeye. A Black Widow post-credits scene, set after Natasha Romanoff’s (Scarlett Johansson) sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame, teased the collision course when the shadowy Val (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) blamed Barton for the death of Yelena’s sister-figure. In the aftermath of Endgame in post-Blip New York at Christmas time, Yelena and Clint will cross paths when the archer comes into the black widow’s crosshairs — and the meeting likely will be anything but merry.

“I can’t speak to that,” Rhys Thomas, who directs with duo Bert and Bertie, told GamesRadar about Hawkeye vs. Black Widow on the Marvel Studios series. “But yes, we know their past, and obviously what happened in Endgame. We know in these first two episodes that Clint’s dealing with the fallout of that. But in terms of how they meet, I can’t – I’ll just pretend I don’t know. Imagine it’s a happy meeting, where they talk over coffee and work things out.”

Despite connections to previous installments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including the Avengers franchise and Black Widow, the new series is “definitely a standalone thing in that we have this Christmas setting, and this very fixed timeframe story,” Rhys said. “But it being the MCU, of course, it all connects in some way as well.”

He added: “And we’ve got new characters, and this was teed up at the end of Black Widow as well. And so everything is always a nice entry point. But I think for the most part, the story is its own little world.”

Black Widow takes place in the mostly unexplored timeline between 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, jumping to the present-day MCU some five years later in the post-credits scene. Eric Pearson, who scripted Yelena’s debut in Black Widow, is also keeping the assassin’s role in Hawkeye close to the vest. 

“As far as where Yelena is off to, I can’t speak to that,” Pearson previously told ComicBook about the post-credits stinger leading into Hawkeye. “I hope it’s everywhere. Just the two of them together, [Yelena and Val] honestly, that scene might’ve been five pages long because I couldn’t write enough of those twos dialogue. We ultimately went for a much shorter version of it, but seeing them together made me very, very happy. And I think they had great chemistry, so I hope there’s so much more to come.”

Starring Jeremy Renner, Hailee Steinfeld, Vera Farmiga, Fra Fee, Tony Dalton, Zahn McClarnon, Brian d’Arcy James and newcomer Alaqua Cox as Maya Lopez, the two-episode series premiere of Marvel’s Hawkeye is November 24.