Peter Parker Could Become Hawkeye in Marvel's What If...? Episode

Still in production despite the coronavirus halting the rest of Marvel Studios' projects, What If...? is shaping up to be an interesting property for the studio as their first venture into animation.

At this point, fans are fully aware that one episode will put Peggy Carter in the place of Steve Rogers and T'Challa taking the role of Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy . But, despite everyone making their own predictions about what the other episodes will explore, including our own predictions , an overlooked piece of news points to a completely unexpected role-reversal.

NEWS

A Reddit user by the same of LordHyperBreath found a video from Variety recapping Marvel's July 2019 San Diego Comic panel. During the recap, Variety reporter Matt Donnelly explains what he had seen during Marvel Studios' What If...? footage, with one of the more interesting tidbits being that Peter Parker was shown as Hawkeye:

And what's interesting about this is that it kinda imagines all the heroes you know and love sort of recast in different roles. I know it's sort of hard to imagine, but they showed images of Tom Holland as Hawkeye. They showed Peggy [Hayley Atwell] as Captain America and it's all animated.

Donnelly does not distinguish in the video whether these images he had seen of Tom Holland were concept art or still images from the series itself.

WHAT THIS MEANS

Before fans jump to conclusions, it's important to realize that this could have easily just been pieces of concept art to exemplify to the audience what Marvel Studios was intending to do with this new property. Fans may not get an episode of Peter Parker becoming an expert marksman and agent of SHIELD, like his parents in the comics.

It does show that Marvel Studios seems very interested in the concept of role-reversal for this series, already doing it with Peggy and T'Challa. However, there's also an episode that could be all about the Zombieverse, so they obviously won't all just be role-reversals. It could very well have been just concept art, since if it wasn't, that would mean three out of the first ten episode order would be this same concept, which could be deemed too repetitive.