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One might think that a show featuring Hawkeye shouldn’t be hard to get off the ground. As one of the Avengers without super-powers, surely his show wouldn’t strain a visual effects budget.

Yet reports are coming out that the show would be surprisingly expensive, that they’ve had trouble casting, and that the show as a whole might be delayed. 

As it turns out, the latter is not true after all. But fans are left wondering just what this show will be about. Fans have a few ideas, at least, of what it will not be. 

The show will not focus on Hawkeye’s family

Jeremy Renner
Jeremy Renner | Mike Smith/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

One of the most surprising things about Avengers: Endgame was its relatively quiet and somber scene featuring Hawkeye’s (Jeremy Renner) family getting taken by the Thanos snap. Fans and Hawkeye, himself, did not see their actual vanishing. But that only made the scene more harrowing.

Hawkeye was so traumatized, he lived as an assassin called Ronin for awhile. Eventually, Hawkeye’s family was rescued, along with everyone else who had disappeared in the snap. As such, that would seem like a logical place for the show to start: Hawkeye getting back with his family after losing five years. But fans on Reddit guess that’s not the plot. 

One fan said: “I wonder if they’ll somehow separate him from his family if this is being influenced by the (comics?). Maybe once his wife finds out about his time as Ronin, she leaves him and takes custody of the kids? I could see that being a lead in to him being broke in an apartment alone.”

Hawkeye might focus on a proxy family 

That seems like an awfully bleak place to take a Marvel series. Gloom and doom, at least once upon a time, had been more DC’s vibe and not the MCU’s. Still, the best guess seems to be that the show would be about him training a successor: Kate Bishop.  

Per Digital Spy, Kate is a socialite who eventually becomes a key figure of the new younger configuration of the Avengers. Rumor had it that Marvel was eyeing Hailee Steinfeld, who had voiced Spider-Gwen in Sony’s Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse. However, Steinfeld was reportedly not able to work the show into her busy schedule. 

Still, the Young Avengers possibilities remain in play, especially with speculation that Scott Lang’s daughter Cassie could be a member of that team too. Not for nothing did Endgame spend time with Scott trying to find his daughter after being lost in the quantum realm. 

Hawkeye is not delayed … yet

When the wave of Disney+ MCU shows were announced, it was clear that Hawkeye would be the capper, following The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision, Loki, and What If..? roughly in that order. Then reports came out that the series was going to be delayed amid rumblings about Renner’s personal problems, including his divorce. 

After those reports came out, however, Marvel said that Hawkeye was not going to be delayed. Just this week, Renner posted on Instagram stories  a Hawkeye logo with the caption: “Time to start stretching.” That’s what sent fans into a tizzy in the first place. 

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic is throwing many Hollywood productions into disarray, with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier halting its shoot in Prague. Hawkeye would seem to be far enough down the pike that it wouldn’t be affected, but with the pandemic rapidly evolving, even Marvel may not be immune to delays after all.

Black Widow released its final trailer this week, still listing May 1 as its release date, but if that date gets pushed back, a lot of other Marvel dates may shift as well.