Marvel Studios executive Trinh Tran sings the praises of Hawkeye‘s hit Rogers: The Musical and reveals hopes for an actual Marvel musical. A play on such shows as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and Broadway’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the in-universe Captain America musical features a show-stopping musical number about Earth’s mightiest heroes and the Battle of New York as seen in 2012’s The Avengers. As fans of the Disney+ series clamor for a real-life Rogers: The Musical, the Avengers: Endgame and Hawkeye executive producer pulls back the curtains on the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s in-universe showstopper:
“I’d love to make a musical one day for Marvel, right? Who wouldn’t?” Tran told The Reel Rejects. “Rogers: The Musical started out as an idea in the backdrop as we were in the writers’ room. It wasn’t anything that [Clint Barton] was gonna go and attend an event, it was just sort of, ‘We’ll see billboards of it. How fun would it be if we picked an instance in the past that the Avengers have experienced and do a musical about that?'”
What started as a quickly-retracted gag suggested by Hawkeye and Saturday Night Live director Rhys Thomas “was just an idea that floated,” Tran said. “Somebody would mention it in the background, or we would see a billboard, but then as we started talking about the musical a little bit more, people got more excited about it. The more excited we got about it, it just sort of grew and grew into an actual event.”
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The series premiere of Hawkeye, “Never Meet Your Heroes,” sees Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) reluctantly attending Rogers: The Musical during a family outing on a Christmas vacation in New York. According to Tran, Rogers: The Musical was nearly even more awkward for the retired Avenger, who leaves mid-show when he’s reminded of late best friend Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson).
”‘Why not have the Avengers be invited to something like this, and then no one shows up but Clint Barton?’ How would he react to that?” she said. “The awkward position that he has to put himself in because everybody wasn’t there but him. It was more lighthearted, and that’s what we were gravitating towards for the series.”
For Thomas, the idea of the showy (and historically inaccurate) Rogers: The Musical came about as ”the last place” that Clint Barton would want to be.
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“I threw it out there in a meeting with [Marvel Studios president and Hawkeye producer] Kevin Feige. And I kind of almost immediately backtracked on it as well,” Thomas told Uproxx about the origins of Rogers: The Musical. “Because, suddenly, I was like, hang on a second, we’re going to have to write music and choreograph it and stage it. And it’s still a lot of work. But Kevin really took hold of it and got excited. And then next thing I know I’m getting to work with [songwriters] Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. I think I tapped into my specialty of making something ‘not too good, not too bad.'”