Marvel reportedly low-balled Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye Season 2 salary offer on purpose so that the show wouldn’t get made.
Created by Jonathan Igla, the MCU Hawkeye miniseries premiered on Disney+ in November 2021. It sees Renner once again reprise his role as Clint Barton/Hawkeye, while the cast also includes Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop, Tony Dalton as Jack Dúquesne, Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, and Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin.
What do we know about the Hawkeye Season 2 situation?
In a recent interview with High Performance, Renner revealed he turned down an offer for Hawkeye Season 2 following a major salary dispute.
“They asked me to do Season 2, and they offered me half the money,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Well, it’s going to take me twice the amount of work for half the amount of money, and eight months of my time, essentially, to do it for half the amount.’”
Renner went on to suggest the lower salary offer was “a result of his near-fatal 2023 snowmobile accident.”
He said, “I’m like, ‘I’m sorry? Why? Did you think I’m only half the Jeremy because I got ran over? Maybe that’s why you want to pay me half of what I made on the first season.’”
According to Jeff Sneider’s The InSneider, Marvel may have offered Renner only half his salary because they knew “he’d turn them down so they wouldn’t have to make a second season of the show.”
Puck’s Matt Belloni also reported on the topic, saying, “Nobody tell Renner the show attracted middling viewership and costs would have come down across the board for a Season 2—that is, if execs weren’t lowballing him in the first place so they could pin the cancellation on him, not them.”
This has not been officially confirmed at this time, as neither Renner nor anybody at Marvel Studios has commented on the matter; although, whether or not anybody would go on the record to confirm such a thing remains to be seen. At the time of this article’s publication, Hawkeye Season 2 has not been greenlit.
The first season, meanwhile, is available to stream on Disney+.
