It's no doubt that SHIELD plays a huge part in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and all of its star players were on the court except one which is undoubtedly was on everyone's minds after the movie ended. Where was Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye in Captain America: The Winter Soldier?
Hawkeye aka Clint Barton is one of the best agents of SHIELD on par with the Black Widow and he is a part of the Avengers so it was a bit strange that he was nowhere to be found in Captain America: The Winter Soldier where Nick Fury, Maria Hill and Black Widow made an appearance. So where was Hawkeye and why wasn't he in the movie?
Eric Eisenberg of Cinemablend asked this to the screenwriters of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley.
According to Eric Eisenberg, the writers admitted that when they were first working on the script there were some big conversations about including Hawkeye in the film. Ultimately, it was decided that they wouldn't be able to give the arrow-flinging hero a proper amount of screen-time because they were introducing and building on so many other characters who really deserved attention.
"We knew we wanted Falcon there, we knew we wanted [Black Widow]," McFeeley told me. "You're introducing Winter Soldier. Fury's got a bigger part in this one. It just started to seem like he was going to kind of get a crappy part."
"If we were going to use him, we really wanted to use him well," Markus added.
"It was decided that having a good script was more important than shoe-horning Hawkeye into the plot - a totally reasonable, smart verdict - but still I wondered if they actually knew what was going on with the character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe while the plot of Captain America: The Winter Soldier was unfolding. Markus explained that they were at one point experimenting with including a line about what Hawkeye was doing, but by the end it wasn't included in the final cut of the film." said Eisenberg
"We toyed around with, and maybe even shot a line or at least in a draft there's a line where we explained he's off somewhere doing something else," McFeeley said, vaguely explaining the agent's whereabouts.
It was then hinted that a Marvel One Shot in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier DVD/Blu-Ray release would answer why Hawkeye was not in the movie but it isn't confirmed yet.
