Kevin Feige says one Age Of Ultron moment convinced him to give Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye his own show

The first two episodes of Disney+’s Hawkeye are coming to the streaming service next week, and Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige decided to celebrate the impending launch of the show during a press conference by revealing why, exactly, he felt the need to finally give Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton a solo (well, solo-ish) superhero adventure.

As it turns out, it’s all because of two things that Feige really likes: stories set on or around Christmas and the scene “you step out that door, you are an Avenger” scene in Avengers: Age Of Ultron. Feige appreciates the inherently heightened emotions and conflicts of the holiday season, and so he said he’s always looking for opportunities to do things with that.

He’s a big supporter of the argument that Iron Man 3 is a Christmas movie (even though it came out in the summer, as he noted during the press conference), and he said Marvel’s original plan was to release the still-upcoming Guardians Of The Galaxy Holiday Special long before Hawkeye ever came out.

The decision to set the show during Christmas also set up the existence of the Hamilton-esque Captain America musical teased in the trailers, which director Rhys Thomas says was originally pitched as a joke. Feige realized that seeing a show tangentially about him would be a good justification for getting Clint and his family in New York during the holidays, though, and now the extremely silly Rogers musical is a minor plot point.

As for why Hawkeye deserves a show, Feige said that he really just wanted more Jeremy Renner, but the thing that made him first realize that Hawkeye could carry a solo story was the aforementioned Age Of Ultron scene. Feige said it’s one of his favorites in the MCU (which is saying something, since it’s one of only two or three really good scenes in that entire movie), and it convinced him that a whole story could be hung on the kind of mentor/mentee relationship that Clint developed with Wanda in that moment.

Also during the press conference, Vera Farmiga (who plays the mother of Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop) revealed that she is actually a trained archer, and Tony Dalton (who plays a version of Jacques Duquesne, a.k.a. the Swordsman) used to be a fencer. Dalton and Renner also offered somewhat-suspiciously canned “I have no idea what you’re talking about” responses to a question about either of them eventually wearing their head-to-toe purple comic book costumes (they literally said it at the exact same time), so… take from that what you will.