With Marvel’s Hawkeye arriving on Disney Plus today, promising a rollicking superhero side adventure centering around the Holidays and hitting the streaming just in time for the extended Thanksgiving weekend, some may wonder just where the series is set in terms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe chronology.
After all, the MCU does not always premiere its titles in story order, with Black Widow and Captain Marvel being two such examples. So it’s reasonable to expect some fans may want to know just what they’re getting into — or catch up with the rest of MCU Phase Four, if applicable — before watching.
Let’s at least get the broad strokes out of the way before we delve into the finer details of where the show takes place.
The plot does indeed pick up where Avengers: Endgame left off, so don’t expect a Black Widow situation where this is all taking place in the build-up to Thanos bringing his reckoning to Earth. In other words, half the universe had been wiped out by Thanos, but then brought back thanks to the Avengers. The show represents the first time we’ve seen Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton since he attended with his family the funeral of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark.
But now that we know the show at least takes place after the “blip,” where does that leave the series in terms of how it fits within the four films and three live-action series that have come out in MCU’s Phase Four so far?
Hawkeye, which centers around the mentee-mentor friendship of Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop and Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton, takes place in Christmas 2024, making it the most chronologically recent installment in the MCU. That means it also takes after the events of several shows and movies, which we’ve listed in chronological order according to the MCU timeline: WandaVision, Loki, Shang-Chi, The Falcon and Winter Solider, and Eternals. In fact, the upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home also takes place before the events of Hawkeye.
The first two episodes of Hawkeye are now streaming on Disney Plus, with subsequent episodes arriving every Wednesday.
