Posted in: Disney+, Marvel, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: disney, hawkeye, Kingpin, marvel, opinion

Is Hawkeye Proving Too Much of a "Trick Arrow" for New Viewers?

Several years ago, while visiting my parents back in Florida, I introduced them to Daredevil. We had a Marvel marathon and drank a lot of vodka as we polished off the entire series in a couple of days. By the time I was heading home, my parents were starting on Jessica Jones. They were Marvel fans and had gone to all of the movies when they came out, but they began to actively seek out the Marvel TV series when I introduced them to the Netflix series. My dad, in particular, lamented the long wait between Daredevil seasons two and three. They have been watching all of the Disney+ shows [except for What If…? which they apparently had no interest in], and when I spoke to them after last week's Hawkeye reveal, I was curious as to what they thought. However, neither of them recognized Vincent D'Onofrio, and while "Kingpin" might have sounded familiar, neither of them made the connection between the Netflix series and the Hawkeye series. Fair Warning? We're going to be getting into spoilers, just so you know…

As fans of Marvel and people who keep an eye on all of this, we sometimes forget that other people aren't as into this stuff and watching the feeds as closely as the rest of us are. In the episode where Maya's "uncle" was first hinted at, we wondered in our review if Kingpin was the right person to bring into this series and if people were going to make the connection because of the different audiences that Daredevil and Hawkeye have, but there could be another reason; people just forgot. The first season of Daredevil premiered in 2015 and the final season aired in late 2018. Most people, like my parents, don't rewatch shows. They have a few hours a day that they watch television, and there is a lot of new television out there. They only watch shows once, and my parents better represent "regular people" than you or even the person who is reading this article on Bleeding Cool.

You don't get the kind of numbers that Marvel does on Twitter fans alone. There are a lot of casual Marvel fans out there that might just watch the movies and shows, and they might not even watch all of those [said parents have no interest in Eternals but have watched Shang-Chi multiple times; my dad is a fan]. So there are plenty of Marvel fans that either haven't watched a Marvel Netflix show since it was released years ago or never did, and that reveal will be lost entirely on them. Hawkeye could save a lot of time by not explaining who Kingpin is by assuming that audiences can figure it out for themselves. As previously said, D'Onofrino's performance can usually speak for itself, and perhaps people unfamiliar or who don't remember him won't have a hard time with this final episode this week.

However, there isn't a lot of time for Hawkeye to wrap everything up this week, so they can't dedicate a lot of time to explaining him or his presence. If they do, there is a chance that the whole season/series finale could get dragged down. The Kingpin reveal is the kind of reveal that works on fans like me and, like you, a reader of Bleeding Cool, but not someone like my parents. My mom and dad represent a more significant majority of comic fans than you and I do, and we have to wonder how many of them were confused by that reveal last week.

Maybe they all just did what my parents used to do when they got out of a Marvel movie, and something happened that confused them; call someone [me] who had the knowledge and have them explain it. Maybe prepare for some more of those phone calls after this Hawkeye finale.

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