New Hawkeye Set Photos Confirm When It Takes Place In The MCU Timeline
With Hailee Steinfeld confirmed as Kate Bishop, fans have been hungry for more and more information on the upcoming Disney+ series Hawkeye, in which Jeremy Renner will reprise his role as the titular archer. Until the series' eventual release, all fans can really do is speculate and be patient as new tidbits trickle in.
The newest of those tidbits is hidden in another group of photos, posted on Twitter, which — as with the photos that revealed Steinfeld as Bishop — show Renner, Steinfeld, and the Golden Retriever playing Lucky the Pizza Dog hanging on location in New York's Chinatown. Look closely in the second and fourth photos, and you'll find a very interesting sign plastered on a door behind the actors: "HAPPY NEW YEAR 2025."
This confirms the series' timeframe within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It may not be as immediately exciting as a release date, but it's definitely not a detail to simply brush over. Of course, if you're too busy admiring that beautiful Golden Retriever... well, that's understandable.
What does this mean for Hawkeye?
In the MCU's first three Phases, the timeframe mostly matches up with real world time, meaning whenever a movie or show came out, it took place in approximately that same year. The biggest deviations, of course, include Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain Marvel, which each set the bulk of their action decades in the past. The most important deviation, however, is Avengers: Endgame, which — courtesy of an in-film time jump of five years — takes place in the MCU's 2023.
Given that Spider-Man: Far From Home was released after Endgame and takes place after its reversal of Thanos' snap, the MCU will likely be sticking to this new timeline for Phase Four onwards. The New Year's poster spotted in these Hawkeye photos not only confirms when the series is set, but when it's set within the MCU timeline specifically: either the final days of 2024 or the beginning of 2025. That could portend a late 2021 or early 2022 release date if the time difference between the real world and the MCU stays consistent, but COVID-19 has a funny way of messing with schedules, so it's impossible to say.
Regardless, a post-Endgame Hawkeye is likely to be a very different man than the one fans have come to know over the course of his many MCU appearances. Indeed, Thanos may be gone, but the ideological and physical warfare he waged has left no one unaffected. What's interesting is that while Hawkeye's whereabouts during and after the Snap are known, Kate's aren't. Was she a victim of Thanos' population control? Did she survive and live through five years of uncertainty? Whatever the case may be, 2025 is barely two years out from the Mad Titan's defeat, so the ripples he left in his wake are sure to affect the archers' relationship in one way or another.