What happened in Budapest is finally revealed in The Avengers. All it took was a simple exchange between Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), joking that it was “just like Budapest.” How, exactly, it was like Budapest would not be revealed until nearly a decade later, and even then it raised as many questions as it gave answers.
As shown in flashbacks during Black Widow, the Budapest mission was to take out Dreykov (Ray Winstone), the leader of the Red Room. The culmination of the operation was Nat and Clint blowing up a five-story building, ostensibly killing not only Dreykov but also his daughter, Antonia (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). The story as told in the movie makes sense, fitting the narrative and themes of Nat’s long-overdue solo outing, but it doesn’t fit quite-so-neatly with the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole.
For starters, there’s the idea of taking on the Chitauri being “just like Budapest,” when there is absolutely nothing to link the two scenarios. Hawkeye, of course, disagreed with that view anyway, and Black Widow proves him right, but it also impacts his story. The Budapest event, and mentions of “Dreykov’s daughter” by Loki, all formed a part of Black Widow’s supposedly dark past. So much of her arc was about being better than she was before, and trying to make up for that red in her ledger, of which Budapest was a huge part. It’s understandable why Nat was so haunted by her past, and by the killing of a child in particular, but why wasn’t Hawkeye too? It seems unjust that Nat suffered so much more than he did, and it also robbed Clint of some potentially fascinating character dynamics and backstory.
The simple answer, of course, is that Marvel did not know the answer to the Budapest question until Black Widow was put into development. And yet, the issue with a prequel that dives into the MCU’s past is that it colours things differently, and so it doesn’t feel right that Black Widow was so plagued by her own history while Hawkeye apparently had no issue with what they did. It’s true that Nat’s crimes ran further because of her time as a Red Room operative, but nonetheless there’s a great disparity between the presentation of the two characters through the MCU, even when both were involved of such a brutal act. You can argue that the call to kill Antonia came from Nat, and that Clint may have been totally unaware at the time, but it seems unlikely he never at least learned the truth, given how big the news would be and how long they spent together afterwards..
Hawkeye did eventually begin to seek a sense of penance, having transformed into Ronin following the Avengers: Endgame, leading to a fight with Natasha that felt somewhat arbitrary at the time, and even more so after Black Widow. Nat sacrificed herself because Hawkeye had a family, but also because of how much she had done in the past that this would seemingly make up for. It was always hard to argue that Nat’s sacrifice was the right choice, but seeing it back now then it feels worse, given Hawkeye too had more to atone for than previously revealed.
Indeed, it’s something a shame that Hawkeye’s darker past was never explored. His pivot to Ronin was something with a lot of potential, but was failure to deliver a Black Widow movie when it really mattered, but of Hawkeyes story as well.
