I have seen Avengers: Endgame enough times that Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton fighting over who gets to throw themselves off Vormir seems obvious, and it doesn’t quite have the emotional weight it once did. Black Widow wins the terrible argument, Hawkeye gets the Soul Stone, and I spend the next hour wondering why Natasha never got the same kind of extended farewell Tony Stark received. Apparently, that outcome wasn’t always locked in, and Hawkeye nearly was the one killed off.
During an Avengers: Endgame Encore Q&A (via Forbes), contributor Tim Lammers and screenwriter Stephen McFeely revealed that they actually tried a version where Hawkeye died instead, but some women at Marvel reacted immediately, and it changed the writers’ thinking. The writers were understandably nervous about killing one of the MCU’s most prominent women, so they tested the opposite outcome, but it didn’t land with the women in the office. McFeely explained:
Because it’s not a small thing to kill off a principal female character in the MCU, we tried a version of Hawkeye [dying] and a number of the female employees at Marvel, when they read [the script], grabbed me in the hallway and said, ‘Don’t you do this to her. Don’t you take her heroic moment and give it to him.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s a really good point.’
I love that somebody apparently intercepted McFeely in a hallway over this, and I get their argument. Killing Hawkeye could have spared Natasha, sure. Still, it also would have handed Clint the huge redemptive sacrifice after Endgame spent much of its opening turning him into the murderous Ronin. Natasha had spent years trying to balance her own ledger. Letting her choose the Avengers over herself gives her agency in how that story ends, even if I still wish Marvel had given everyone more time to deal with losing her.
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That remains my biggest frustration with the Vormir sequence. Ultimately, Natasha’s Endgame story culminates in her death; the surviving Avengers mourn her briefly, but Endgame has roughly a thousand other things to accomplish before the credits roll, so the film moves on quickly. McFeely knows it. He continued:
The sacrifice is at the end of act two, which meant there was a lot of movie left. There was not that much time to mourn Natasha because we got to snap everybody back and Thanos has to bomb us, and the Avengers have to fight their biggest fight in the MCU and Captain America has to wield Thor’s hammer … we had a lot to do. We were mentioning her all over the ending of the movie, where Hulk says, ‘I tried to bring her back,’ and Hawkeye is lamenting her loss with the Scarlet Witch. It was about the best we could have done, given there was another character that was going to sacrifice himself.
The writers did try to keep Natasha present after Vormir, but Avengers: Endgame ultimately builds toward Tony Stark’s sacrifice, with his death becoming the emotional centerpiece of the finale. By that point, there’s simply not much room left to give Natasha a bigger farewell.
She eventually got a solo movie that works, in many ways, as a belated swan song. Still, I would have preferred a more substantial goodbye in the final major Marvel movie she appeared in chronologically by release.
Now, seven years later, I still think Natasha deserved more space. But knowing Marvel seriously considered killing Hawkeye instead makes the Vormir sequence even more interesting. Somewhere along the way, people at Marvel watched Clint fall from that cliff and basically told the writers, “Absolutely not.” And Natasha still got her sacrificial moment.
For better or worse, Clint kept his appointment with television, starring in his own series titled Hawkeye, which is streamable for everyone with a Disney+ subscription. Also, check out Avengers: Endgame using that same subscription to prepare for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, which opens in theaters on December 18 amid the 2026 movie schedule.