Hawkeye: The Complete First Season - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray SteelBook

Whether on the big screen or streaming, Marvel is gonna Marvel. Whaddya gonna do amirite? You’re either all in on the adventure and it feels like it’s going to go somewhere, or it’s just a middling outing that’s pretty fun, but the plot just feels like it's going through the motions to introduce new characters that’ll be more important later. In the case of Hawkeye The Complete First Season, it’s the latter - but a good version of the latter. 

The last time we saw Clint Barton, he was returning as the true hero Hawkeye to fight Thanos' armies alongside the Avengers after a long time undercover as the stealth ninja assassin Ronin. Now all Clint wants to do is get his blipped-back family home for a true festive Christmas. But a piece of his dark past Echo (Alaqua Cox) returns aiming for revenge. At the same time, a new highly skilled archer by the name of Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) is on the scene fighting crime like her idol Hawkeye. If Clint has any hope of getting Ho-Ho-Home in time for a Hap-Hap-Happy Christmas, he’ll have to work with Bishop to stop a deadly crime syndicate. 

The best way to describe the overall quality of Hawkeye: The Complete First Season is something on a social-economic scale. This series is more of a middle-class outing but on the upper side of the spectrum. It’s certainly not an ultra-wealthy 1% new high point for the ever-expanding MCU, nor is it a low-tier space-filling effort. The series is fun and very entertaining with a nice lighthearted sense of humor that also doesn’t cheap out on great action sequences. But at the same time, like so many other MCU projects, it’s not content to stand on its own. This series is a bridge, not only to introduce a new Hawkeye but also to establish Echo and reintroduce Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin into the MCU proper (there was a weird time there when the Netflix Marvel shows might not have been canon, but now they are so it’s all good). If that’s not enough we’re also getting more time with Florence Pugh’s Yelena so we don’t forget her ahead of the upcoming Thunderbolts movie.

Where this series struggles most is with tone. On one side we have this fun semi-silly master-training-protege dynamic between Clint and Kate working together. The stakes are high as our central criminal conspiracy may implicate her family, but they’re not so high as to be too dour or overly serious. On the other end, we have this revenge and redemption dynamic between Clint's former persona and Echo where things are absolutely deathly serious. There’s little room for lighthearted fun with this more grounded content. Which is great, don’t get me wrong. It’s solid stuff, but the two very distinct tones don’t always marry well. And through the lens of the series that came after, I can’t say the effort to introduce Echo amounted to much beyond another overly long miniseries. I love seeing D’Onofrio’s Kingpin back in action, but at the same time, I question the necessity of his appearance for this particular series. Daredevil: Born Again looks to tie those threads up. 

As a whole, I enjoyed Hawkeye: The Complete First Season but in the three-ish years since this show came out on Disney+, I haven’t felt the want or need to revisit it. I liked it, didn’t love it. At just over four and a half hours, it’s not so long that it overstays its welcome, but at the same time, I wish it hadn’t been saddled with extraneous expansion that didn't serve our main characters. Jeremy Renner handing off the bow and arrow to Steinfeld was enough - and especially important since he got run over by a snowplow in real life. If nothing else this series delivered a hilarious Avengers musical! 

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 
Hawkeye: The Complete First Season takes aim at its first and so far only disc release on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray with stylish SteelBook packaging. The six episodes are spread over two Region Free BD100 discs. Inside the SteelBook is a packet of art cards - for whatever that’s worth in your decision-making process. The SteelBook is a bit on the busy side with a lot of Christmas lights swirling around the front with a slick city rooftop depiction on the back and Rogers the Musical stretch of Broadway on the inside. Each disc loads to Disney’s standard language menu before letting you dive right into the series or go to basic main menu with standard navigation options.

Among the first of the Disney+ series releases to arrive with Dolby Vision HDR on disc and not a streaming exclusive, hats off to the House of Mouse for a genuinely splendid 2160p 2.39:1 transfer for each episode. Similar to previous disc releases, the uptick in bitrate and the lack of streaming compression really lets the visuals of this series pop. From full daylight scenes to a darkened musical theater to the nighttime rooftop battles, the visuals hold up beautifully easily outpacing the streaming experience. Facial features, production design, and costume details are all on display. HDR grading hits just right letting all of the holiday colors pop with plenty of blue, red, and yellow punches. The purple-accented outfits of our two archers are nice accents to all of the dark black suits running around. Skin tones are healthy and human without appearing peached or pinked. One episode to the next, this is a worthy addition to the collection for fans.

In keeping with the visuals, each episode of Hawkeye fires off one heck of a great Atmos mix. We get flashbacks to big key action events like the attack on New York from The Avengers with some wild sequences to come in each episode. Throughout the soundscape is active and engaging letting those surround channels liberally fire away providing an engaging immersive experience. Height channels are cleverly used in these big action scenes so they’re not just extraneous scene-setting spacers while the numerous on-the-ground city scenes let the chaotic noise of the location drift throughout the channels. With all of the gunfire, explosions, crashes, and rough-and-tumble fisticuffs, LFE also has plenty of heft and weight behind each impact. Musical numbers are well-appointed while dialog maintains a focused presence with a great score from Christophe Beck and Michael Paraskevas.

The series comes with a solid assortment of extras. Perhaps not groundbreaking stuff, but not lacking either. The most informative is the nearly hour-long Assembled: The Making of Hawkeye which covers a large swath of the production, character dynamics, cast, and so forth. On disc two there is a quick fluffy featurette about our two Hawkeye heroes with a typical gag reel followed by about half an hour of deleted scenes. The deleted content isn’t stuff you’d “miss” exactly, but interesting tidbits. Certainly understanding why they were excised given the timing and pace of the series. 

4K Disc One

• Assembled: The Making of Hawkeye (HD 58:27)

4K Disc Two

• Deleted Scenes (HD 29:58)
• A Tale of Two Hawkeyes (HD 8:28)
• Gag Reel (HD 2:02)

Hawkeye wasn’t a perfect series for Disney+ but it was a fun one. Considering all of the things it set out to do, I thought it worked pretty damn well while providing some fun holiday action entertainment. If Jeremy Renner is truly done with the bow, he passed the quiver of trick arrows off to the right gal with Hailee Steinfeld stepping up to the plate. It might have hinged on too much universe expansion with some specific characters but that’s a small quibble against everything else the series accomplishes. On 4K UHD disc, the series shines bright and merry with excellent Dolby Vision transfers, exciting Atmos audio tracks, and a couple of solid extras. Recommended