Hawkeye Has Broken A Lethal MCU Record
Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) just spent the past few weeks graduating from "bow and arrow guy" to a hero we can't help but care for — and it turns out, that isn't even his most notable accolade. Someone whip out a gold medal because Hawkeye just broke a big Marvel record by snagging himself the highest kill count in a single Marvel Cinematic Universe project. That's right folks, the deadliest Avenger is indeed the guy with no real powers!
By now, we're no stranger to how these kill counts go: they often work under the assumption of presumed kills like, say, the results of a giant arrow piercing a truck and causing a massive car explosion. Even though the fallout isn't always addressed onscreen, this count includes the sort of situations that logically yield no survivors. But here's the interesting thing about "Hawkeye" — both the character and the series — death is core to his story. Clint's dark and haunted past as Ronin drives the plot of his new show, as he attempts to keep his past under wraps. Unfortunately, his days of massacring criminals can't be so easily buried and resurfaces just in time to ruin his holiday season. Ultimately this background lets us know that Clint is no stranger to killing and offers more than a few confirmed kills for the series — including the episode 3 flashback that sees him taking out many members of the Tracksuit Mafia.
Between the Ronin flashbacks and partnering with Kate (Hailee Steinfeld) to take down mafia members in the present, Clint proves to be a deadly adversary for the Tracksuits. So as the nameless Imagine Dragons-loving goons scramble around, failing to pull out a win, we have no choice but to assume that many of them didn't survive their encounters with the bow-wielding Avenger. Getting into the nitty-gritty of it all, ScreenRant recently got to work doing the impossible and calculated every potential onscreen death in "Hawkeye." The series kill count lands around 50 to 55 bodies, which doesn't include arrows aimed at hands or feet not does it count any of the non-lethal seeming arrows (sorry USB arrow).
We didn't think arrow guy had it in him, but Clint's Christmas kill count is the highest of any non-Avengers MCU project. For the sake of simplicity, we aren't including any alien invasion-related events, so neither the Chitauri nor Thanos are in the running. Anyway, Thanos' big half-the-universe kill gets reversed in the end and happened under pretty extreme circumstances, so disqualifying him only seems fair. So yes, Clint is now the reigning kill champion... Yay?
The Avengers Kill Count
Now that Hawkeye has won the gold medal of death, we can't help but wonder — where do his fellow Avengers stack up? This is where things get much more complicated. Hawkeye is relatively easy to calculate partially because death is such a big part of his story. His Ronin deaths are acknowledged by the story and Clint himself, as he continues grappling with the past. Then there's the logistics of it all: tracking where a sword or arrow pierces is a little more straightforward than analyzing every blow Captain America lands on his enemies — so things get much more ambiguous for our other heroes. Though Thor hasn't killed many people onscreen, we know him to be a deadly warrior who's over 1,500 years old. However many onscreen deaths we estimate for him could still be multiplied five times over — which is still just a best guess.
Tony Stark previously held the highest onscreen kill count for his debut film — busting out of his Ten Rings captivity with the very first Iron Man suit was a deadly gambit. But if we factor in the alien invasions of it all, then he still comes out on top for that time he decimated Thanos' army with his counter snap in "Avengers: Endgame." But what about collateral damage? While "Captain America: Civil War" delved into the damage that comes from our heroes saving the day, "WandaVision" offered a glimpse at some of the harm done by Tony's time creating weaponry for the government. Add that to the mix and I'm guessing Tony starts racking up bodies at an alarming rate.
Oops, is this getting too bleak? I haven't even gotten to Black Widow ( a literal assassin) or Steve Rogers (a WWII supersoldier). And what of Bruce Banner? Does "The Incredible Hulk" even count? Should his kills be separate from the Hulks? Who's to say how many people were harmed each time he crashed into a building? Maybe we should just let the archer keep the kill count crown, lest this superhero franchise get darker than we can handle.
Hawkeye is now streaming on Disney+.