10 Ridiculously Pointless Marvel Cinematic Universe Characters

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is such a complex, labyrinthine beast that it's easy to let Kevin Feige, Joss Whedon and everyone involved on the creative side get away with a lot. After all, just look at how DC's efforts to replicate the same sort of thing have continually fallen flat on their faces (and the jury of course remains out on Batman vs. Superman, which is fast becoming "Justice League: The Movie"). As great as the MCU is as a whole, the individual films (The Avengers excluded) don't quite match up to the sum of their parts, and that's often because of the less than memorable characters the heroes have to deal with. For every brilliant villain like Loki there's a comedy sidekick we could do without or a potentially awesome character from the comics who just hasn't had the right cinematic treatment yet. Most of these pointless characters aren't quite beyond saving yet, but I'm not exactly eager to see them on screen any time soon. As usual, feel free to argue away in the comments!

10. Hawkeye (The Avengers)

Pointless Because: Easily the most disappointing element of The Avengers, even actor Jeremy Renner himself confessed that the end result of Hawkeye was nothing like he signed up for. He's just a zombie in The Avengers, under the possession of Loki for a significant portion of his screen time, and afterwards he ends up just being a mostly forgettable soldier during the Battle of New York (save for the badass no-scope pictured above). Even the most interesting part of his character, his relationship with Black Widow, has seemingly ultimately amounted to nothing. It gets even worse €“ going by what we've seen from Captain America: The Winter Soldier so far, Cap and Widow might be making something of it instead. How To Fix It: Flesh out his relationship with Black Widow, or if Cap has designs on her, give him some kick ass action and an actual personality. Granted, this won't be easy given how unenthusiastic and wooden an actor Jeremy Renner seems half the time (and the other half, he's actually pretty damn good, strangely enough), but a few killer Whedon one-liners wouldn't go wrong.