Huge Hawkeye BTS Reveal Hints Kingpin Was Never Shot

A detail in Hawkeye‘s behind-the-scenes documentary hints that Kingpin was never shot. Maya faced off against him in the show’s finale and aimed her gun before the camera panned away. A flash of light and booming noise suggested that Kingpin was then shot off-screen, but viewers never actually saw what happened to him, and a moment in Assembled: The Making of Hawkeye fuels doubts that he was killed.

The Disney+ Hawkeye series repeatedly emphasized Kingpin’s unnatural strength much more than his previous appearances in Daredevil ever did. In Hawkeye, Kingpin was able to walk away from being hit by moving vehicles, explosions, and Clint Barton’s arrows, so there was always a good chance he would’ve survived a gunshot as well. However, he may not have had to.

A change in the closed captions for the Hawkeye documentary suggests Kingpin may never have been shot in the first place. The original caption at the end of Hawkeye said “gunshot” when Maya pulled the trigger, but the behind-the-scenes documentary changes the subtitles to read “explosion” during that scene instead. It’s a very odd change to make, raising the question of why anyone would bother making such a minor adjustment at all if it did not affect the Hawkeye show. A gunshot is, after all, a kind of explosion, but why would the creators move away from the specificity of the word gunshot to something more generic?

Hawkeye‘s caption change could signify that there was an outside interruption to Maya and Kingpin’s showdown. Something may have prevented her from pulling the trigger in the first place, thus granting Kingpin time to escape, but which sounded similar enough to a gunshot that unsuspecting viewers wouldn’t know the difference. There were so many moving pieces in Hawkeye‘s final battle — from the Tracksuit Mafia to the LARPers and Clint’s many special arrows — that there’s a chance someone was nearby and tried to stop Maya and/or Kingpin by setting off a small explosion. It’s also possible that an explosion went off by accident. Maya and Kingpin could have stumbled upon an exploding arrow that did not go off correctly, or one of the items shrunk by the Pym Particle arrows suddenly returned to normal size with a loud bang. The possibilities for what happened after the camera panned away are truly endless.

The caption change from “gunshot” to “explosion” in the Hawkeye documentary could be entirely meaningless, but it could also be implying that there’s more at play in the final confrontation between Maya and Kingpin than what the Disney+ series previously revealed. Hopefully, the next time Kingpin shows up; he will provide some answers as to what actually happened off-screen. Marvel has not yet shared any plans for Kingpin’s future, but it’s safe to assume that Hawkeye will not be his last appearance in the MCU.

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