A recent promo for Avengers: Infinity War focused on the journey Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have undertaken over the first decade of the MCU, splicing clips from previous movies together with new footage from the upcoming blockbuster. One hero who wasn’t featured, though, was Hawkeye (obviously). Despite being a founding member of the Avengers, Jeremy Renner’s archer has been left out of pretty much all Infinity War marketing so far.
This promo, it turns out, actually went to extra lengths to deliberately cut the character out. As spotted by a Marvel fan on Twitter, the studio cropped Hawkeye out of frame in a clip showing a moment from 2012’s The Avengers. Fans will remember that the original footage sees Clint Barton standing to the left of the image. In fact, in the zoomed-in screenshot, you can still see his arrows.
they cropped Hawkeye out, then hell #InfinityWar pic.twitter.com/KkYKzviHiC
— Anton Volkov (@antovolk) April 12, 2018
This discovery just makes it 100% clear that Marvel are going well out of their way to keep Hawkeye out of the marketing for Infinity War by any means necessary. In fact, at this point, the absence of the character is becoming much more notable than if he actually had been featured now and then in the trailers. It’s almost as if Marvel is making sure that fans take notice of the fact that he’s missing.
Perhaps this is teasing that the hero, who has always been the least-equipped Avenger to deal with major cosmic-level threats, actually has a very important job to do this time around? After all, there are theories that Barton could be on a quest to find the coveted Soul Stone and it would be quite neat if Hawkeye proves the naysayers wrong by being the one to reclaim the one Infinity Stone that even Thanos couldn’t find.
All we know right now is that the Russo brothers have promised that they simply haven’t forgotten about Hawkeye and the reason for his absence will become clear in time. Two weeks’ time, that is, as Avengers: Infinity War finally hits cinemas on April 27th.
