Last week Jeremy Renner suggested that he could be set to follow-up his role in Avengers: Age of Ultron with another outing as Hawkeye in 2016’s Captain America 3; however, as it happened, screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely had planned to include the archer in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, with Renner’s schedule ultimately preventing him from appearing. Now, during an interview with Screen Rant, co-director Joe Russo has detailed just exactly how Hawkeye would have figured into this year’s Phase Two solo sequel:
What it was going to be, we were trying to complicate the relationship between Cap and his S.H.I.E.L.D agent friends. If Hawkeye got a call from S.H.I.E.L.D saying Captain America is a fugitive, would he listen to that call or not listen to that call? That sequence actually was heartbreaking for us to cut it. I think it ultimately might have been a conflict with Renner’s schedule. But there was a great sequence where Hawkeye was chasing Cap through Washington D.C. there was an awesome sequence where they confronted each other in a ravine on the outskirts of D.C. and Hawkeye was shooting a series of arrows closing in on Cap, Cap closing in on him. And then Cap took him down and he realized for the first time that Hawkeye was trying to trick S.H.I.E.L.D, where he whispered something into Cap’s ear that Cap had a tracker on his suit and to punch Hawkeye to make it look real, because there was a Quinjet hovering above where they were watching the feedback back at S.H.I.E.L.D.
So it was a cool sequence. But look, there’s a million iterations of films, and especially when dealing with Marvel movies where characters can come in or come out during the creative process. And you keep working and working like a Rubik’s Cube till you find the right configuration where everything lines up. So even though we lost that sequence, I think we may have streamlined the movie and made it a little bit more propulsive.
Are you disappointed that the scene was cut from the script?
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is out on DVD and Blu-ray in the States on September 9th in the States, with a cast that includes Marvel veterans Chris Evans (Captain America), Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Sebastian Stan (Winter Soldier), Cobie Smulders (Agent Maria Hill), Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter), Toby Jones (Arnim Zola) and Maximiliano Hernandez (Agent Jasper Sitwell) alongside Cinematic Universe newcomers Anthony Mackie (The Hurt Locker) as Sam Wilson / Falcon, Emily VanCamp (Revenge) as Sharon Carter / Agent 13, Frank Grillo (Zero Dark Thirty) as Brock Rumlow / Crossbones, George St-Pierre (Death Warrior) as Georges Batroc / Batroc the Leaper, and Robert Redford (All Is Lost) as Alexander Pierce.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is out on DVD and Blu-ray.
Originally published September 2, 2014. Updated April 15, 2018.
