The Direct is reporting that the Hawkeye series coming to Disney+ is currently casting European actors to play a gang of mobsters who will appear in multiple episodes. You have to believe that these will be members of the Tracksuit Mafia, a group who terrorised Clint Barton (and Kate Bishop) in Matt Fraction’s comic book run.

According to the audition notes, they’ve been reading for a scene which will see the mobsters break into a guarded building to steal back something that was stolen from them previously. 

It sounds like what they’re after is a chemical weapon of some sort, and while there’s nothing to say this is a moment we’ll see in Hawkeye, it’s interesting that it was once rumoured that The Falcon and The Winter Soldier will also feature a virus subplot (which has reportedly been removed as a result of the real-life COVID-19 pandemic). 

In the source material, the Tracksuit Mafia actually invaded the building Hawkeye was living in, so it’s possible that the Disney+ TV show is going to do something similar. We’ll obviously have to wait and see, but with a rumoured premiere date of 2021, it could be a while before we learn more. 

What are your thoughts on this news?

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Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s final episode was a strong ending for the long-running ABC series, but it may have also established how little the Marvel Television era of shows mean to the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe. While the show has been doing its own thing since Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the hope was that this final season would tie into Avengers: Endgame somehow.

We did get mentions of the Quantum Realm, alternate timelines, and even time-travel, but even after the team returned to their timeline, there were some big hints that their adventures don’t take place in the MCU. For starters, when they arrive in 2020 (two years after the “Blip”), the world seems perfectly normal, and a hopeful place rather than once that’s been decimated by Thanos. 

Throw in the fact that Mack has donned Nick Fury’s trenchcoat to lead a new S.H.I.E.L.D. – who were completely M.I.A. from that final battle with the Mad Titan – and Quake heading into outer space, and it’s beginning to look like these adventures always took place in some sort of alternate reality where Fury was able to resurrect Agent Coulson shortly after the events of The Avengers. 

That’s an intriguing prospect, and one which explains a lot. It’s likely something Marvel Studios is planning for all of the Marvel Television-era shows, especially as Kevin Feige had limited involvement in them.

What Culture actually has a full recap of this series finale of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., so if you want to know the final fates of each character, be sure to head there to take a look!

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As you’ll no doubt recall if you played Spider-Man, Avengers Tower was a location you could visit in the game, but Earth’s Mightiest Heroes themselves were off doing something else at the time.

Since then, there’s been a lot of speculation that the PlayStation 4 game will somehow tie into Marvel’s Avengers, but Marvel Games boss Bill Rosemann now makes it clear that won’t be the case. 

“Each game is in the Marvel universe, but they’re in their own reality, if you will,” he told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview. “Currently, our plan is to keep each game set in its own Marvel universe.”

The reason for that is to give creative teams as much freedom as possible, and you can see why it might get a little complicated to combine the two worlds. After all, Marvel’s Avengers takes place in a reality which sees the team disassemble for five years, and a Spider-Man crossover would be meaningless for gamers playing on Xbox One or PC. 

The web-slinger will be part of the PlayStation version of the upcoming game, though Rosemann has made it clear that it will be a separate, unrelated incarnation to the one seen in 2018’s Spider-Man. As for the future of Marvel Games, a Spider-Man sequel after Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a given, but asked what comes beyond that, he chose his words carefully.

“I’ll just say we’re concentrating really hard on making Marvel’s Avengers, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales the best games possible. As the late great Stan Lee said, ‘Stay tuned, True Believers!'”

What titles would you like to see from them moving forward?
 

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After Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. pretty much stopped referencing the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe and became its own separate entity. It was also around this time shows like Daredevil and Luke Cage seemingly remained trapped in a post-The Avengers world and never really moved beyond that (not referencing the Sokovia Accords, for example). 

In an interview with the AV Club, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. executive producers Jed Whedon and Jeffrey Bell were asked whether they were ever stopped from doing anything in the series, and the former started by recounting a fun plan for Enver Gjokaj following his return as Daniel Sousa. 

“There was talk about Sousa having to do a detour undercover as a cop to fight in the streets in Avengers because Enver was in that film [as a police officer],” he explains, “but there was enough timeline problems. [Laughs.]”

That could have been a lot of fun for fans, but the conversation took a different turn when Whedon revealed Marvel Studios changed course on one character, in particular.

“We had a lot of ideas where we were—and I’ll say this, I don’t care—we were given the green light originally to use certain characters from Marvel, and started to break story based on those characters—[Coughs.] MODOK—and then they retracted it,” Whedon said of Marvel Studios. “So there were a bunch of things that were going to get a little batshit crazy that were above our pay grade, in terms of the toys we were allowed to play with.”

That could be taken as a sign that M.O.D.O.K. will indeed be part of Ant-Man 3, but also an indication that, as time went on, Marvel Studios started limiting who the show could borrow from the comics. 

There will, of course, be some fans who get upset about this, but M.O.D.O.K. on a TV budget? You remember Deathlok, right? Still, it will be interesting to see if the producers reveal any more…

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Entertainment Weekly reveals that Spider-Man: Miles Morales is set during winter one year after the events of Spider-Man, and it follows the young hero in Harlem as his home risks being torn apart by a war between an energy corporation and a criminal organisation armed with advanced tech. 

Despite being smaller in scale, the game’s creative director Brian Horton explains: “This is a full arc for Miles Morales that started in Spider-Man. We really are completing this hero’s coming of age in our game. It is a complete story. [We] realized that, with a little bit more of a compact storytelling style, we could tell a very emotionally impactful story that would fit really well as an experience that would take Spider-Man 1 and [Miles Morales] and do justice to this character.”

Fans can expect a very different Spider-Man when they take control of Miles, thanks to new animations, movements, mechanics, and powers (which include invisibility and bioshock). 

Asked about Miles’ transformation into this superhero, Horton explains that his is “more so born out of family. What I think is really compelling about Miles as a character is he has friends that he could actually let into his world — his human world and his Spider world. He’s a little different in the way he approaches it.”

The article also mentions that Miles very nearly didn’t have a leading role in Spider-Man as his appearance there was originally going to be saved for a post-credits scene. However, Insomniac decided it was important for us to get to know him as a character before getting to take control of him. 

Check out a new shot from the PlayStation 5 game below:
 

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