Hawkeye Writing Team Didn’t Know About Black Widow Post-Credits Scene

December 11, 2021

According to the writing staff of Disney+’s Hawkeye, the team had no clue that Black Widow‘s post-credit scene would involve them so heavily.

For those unaware, Black Widow‘s post-credits scene saw Florence Pugh’s character Yelena — the sister to Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow — ready to chase down Hawkeye in retaliation for Black Widow’s death. During the most recent episode of the Disney+ series, Yelena appeared again, this time attacking Clint Barton.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Hawkeye‘s head writer Jonathan Igla said that the team was already writing Yelena into the series prior to the Black Widow film’s post-credit scene. While he was told of the post-credit scene by Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige, he had to keep that information to himself and not tell any of the team.

“There was a length of time where I wasn’t supposed to share it with the rest of the writing staff. There were a handful of things like that, which was challenging,” Igla said. “I did my best. I like to think that I’m an honest broker and if somebody tells me not to share something, even if I think, ‘Well the writing staff really needs to know this,’ then I’m just going to trust their process …. I kept it under my hat for a while.”

While the team behind Hawkeye wasn’t aware of the post-credit scene, the team behind the Black Widow film were also kept unaware of what the ramifications for that scene would be. Black Widow screenwriter Eric Pearson remembers being told to write the scene in which Yelena would be put on the trail of Hawkeye, but not why it was being included.

“They told me, ‘and then at the end, this is the target.’ And I was like, ‘What does that mean?’ They were like, ‘Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to know that,’” Pearson said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. “I was like, ‘Who am I screwing over? Something is going on! I don’t have an answer for this.’ They were like, ‘You don’t need to. We are going to figure that out.’”

Thankfully for fans, answers are likely to come soon, as Hawkeye is in full swing and Yelena’s storyline is likely to be explored in the coming episodes of the series.