10 Major Characters Cut From MCU Movies (And Why)

9. Hawkeye - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

The Original Plan

Jeremy Renner really hasn't been used enough in the MCU and while his late-stage evolution into the more badass Ronin is a positive step, his second class status has been frustrating. Even more annoyingly, he could have appeared in one of the best MCU films too.

According to screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, Hawkeye was originally supposed to be appear briefly. The plan was to have him chase Cap when he escapes SHIELD, catching him but ultimately letting him flee. Sounds like the kind of thing such a Great Man would do.

Why He Was Cut

As McFeely and Markus told CinemaBlend, the reason they cut him was that there were already too many supporting characters and they didn't want to do him a disservice with nothing real to do:

"We knew we wanted Falcon there, we knew we wanted [Black Widow]...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."

There was some thought to including a line to explain his whereabouts too, but that ended up being cut. According to the writers he was just "off on a mission" somewhere.