Avengers: Endgame explained: The Kate Bishop tease
The moment the Avengers: Endgame trailer dropped featuring Hawkeye training a young female archer, the internet reacted with two words: Kate Bishop.
That’s the apprentice warrior first introduced in 2005’s Young Avengers #1 who later took on the mantle of Hawkeye.
So, how did that prediction turn out?
***Spoilers Below***
Not great. In the opening seconds of Endgame, we hear Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye call the girl “Lila.” That’s the character’s daughter, not Kate Bishop.
There is a Disney+ series in the works focusing on Hawkeye and Kate Bishop, but we don’t meet her in Endgame.
In the Marvel Comics, Bishop first discovers Hawkeye’s cache of weapons, and begins training herself in their use. He happens to be dead at the time, but after he is resurrected he becomes her mentor, and their friendship is the foundation of the instant-classic Hawkeye comic series by writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja.
So were directors Anthony and Joe Russo bothered that fans assumed the character in the trailers was this iconic hero?
“No, because I think that’s part of how we want people’s brains working,” Joe told EW.
“Thinking about possibilities,” Anthony added.
“And it doesn’t mean that there’ll never be a Kate Bishop story,” Joe said, noting the Disney+ series. He said they knew comic book fans would draw this connection. “There’s a reason that we wanted that iconography in this movie.”
There’s one more twist to all this, a personal one for Joe: The young woman playing Hawkeye’s daughter is his own daughter, Ava Russo.
His other daughter, Lia, also has a role in Endgame, as one of the young Hulk fans who approach him in the diner.
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