Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye is back in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the release of this month’s Avengers: Endgame. The movie will fill fans in on what’s happened to the character since we last saw him in Captain America: Civil War and presumably before the Decimation (Marvel hasn’t said he’ll return for a third film). One thing that’s been hinted at is that Clint Barton has adopted the persona of Ronin, a mantle he first took in the comics after his family was murdered. But what exactly does this mean for his arc going forward?
A little background:
In the Marvel universe, superheroes often have multiple personas and identities to protect them from rogue threats and public scrutiny. In the case of MCU heroes, many of them are forced to hide their identities under the Sokovia Accords or the Superhuman Registration Act introduced in Captain America: Civil War. In the comics, the SHRA is what led to Hawkeye’s adoption of Ronin — an identity that would allow him to operate undercover with the New Avengers after his return and avoid the Sokovia Accords.
The prevailing theory is that Hawkeye became Ronin in order to deal with the loss of his family. This also explains why he’s in Japan in the trailer, where he seems to be fighting the Yakuza (a Japanese crime syndicate) and wearing a kilt. This makes sense and is consistent with his arc in the comics, where he became Ronin to fight crime as a way to heal from his family’s death.
He kept the name for a good while and eventually passed the persona to Kate Bishop, who was a Young Avenger at the time and wore a purple costume with trick arrows. He also loaned her his code name, costume and ninja-inspired weapons, which Polygon points out were actually first introduced in the MCU in 2005’s New Avengers by Maya Lopez, who went on to become the character Echo.
This all works out in the movies because of what we know about the MCU’s rules on reusing characters. But it’s a bit more complicated than that in the comics, where multiple characters have borrowed the persona of Ronin from others before. This includes Blade and Red Guardian, both of whom appeared in the MCU after 2010. And this could be a sign that Endgame will see a different version of the character than we’re used to.