Hawkeye: Composers for Rogers: The Musical Reveal Their Marvel Origin Story

As seen in the initial marketing for Hawkeye, the series is going to honor the legacy of Steve Rogers by giving the fallen Avenger his very own musical. While the scene itself seemed like a passing nod, it turns out Marvel Studios went wild with it, hiring a pair of songwriters with serious Broadway ties to craft a musical piece. Enter, March Shaiman and Scott Wittman.

The duo said they were networking at an Academy Award luncheon when they were introduced by a mutual friend to Kevin Feige.

“[Scott and I] were at an Academy Award dinner, and I’m sitting there and someone taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Excuse me, Kevin Feige would love to meet you,’” Shaiman recently told Marvel.com. “I knew who Kevin was, and I was like he wants to meet me, really? Turns out Kevin is a film score nerd. He started talking about [the scores I’ve written] one by one and I was like, I cannot believe this is happening. We started trading emails about scores and this and that, and when I would see [Marvel movies] I would send him an email. I guess when this idea came up for Hawkeye, for there to be a musical on Broadway, he luckily thought of us, and [Scott and I] couldn’t be more ecstatic about it.”

As it turns out, Feige offered the duo a job writing Rogers: The Musical, which amounts to one musical number in one of Hawkeye’s first two episodes. Neither of the two admit they were big Marvel fans before, but luckily Shaiman’s husband Lou can’t get enough of the MCU.

“It seemed fate that I married a man who was a total Marvel nerd. So, I would go with him as a good husband to go watch all the movies, then we would usually sit in the parking lot of the movie theater, and I’d say what did I just see? How does that all work and who’s who, and little by little I started putting all the pieces together,” the composer added. “We were both lucky to have [my husband, because] he could just spit out whatever the words are like, you know, ‘Tesseract.’ I never knew that Scott and I would write a song with the word ‘Tesseract’ in it.”

Hawkeye debuts with a two-episode premiere on Disney+ on November 24th.

What other characters do you hope to see pop up in Hawkeye? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter to chat all things MCU!

If you haven’t signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here. Note: If you purchase one of the awesome, independently chosen products featured here, we may earn a small commission from the retailer. Thank you for your support.