'Hawkeye' head writer says he got the idea for an MCU musical after passing a 'Hamilton' billboard every day

• The "Hawkeye" head writer told Insider that "Rogers The Musical" was inspired by "Hamilton."
• Jonathan Igla said that he got the idea after passing a billboard for the hit Broadway musical every day.

The "Hawkeye" head writer told Insider that he got the idea for an MCU musical after passing a "Hamilton" billboard every day.

In the first episode of the new show released on Disney+ Wednesday, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) visits a broadway musical about Captain America called "Rogers the Musical." In the episode, we see one song from the musical, "I Can Do This All Day," which is about the battle of New York from "The Avengers" and stars all the original Avengers and Ant-Man.

In a previous interview with Insider, "Hawkeye" director Rhys Thomas said that it was a "silly idea" he had. However, Jonathan Igla, the head writer of "Hawkeye," later told Insider that he was the mastermind behind the musical.

"I will say with absolutely zero human humility, it was my idea, and it wasn't a throwaway idea," Igla told Insider. "I tried to present it in a low-key way but it was something that I was always really excited about."

He continued: "Every day on the way to work, I passed by a Hamilton billboard and one morning I just had the idea. I thought it would be really fun and I wasn't sure that we would get to feature it in as big a way as we do.

"So that turned out to be a really pleasant surprise, but that is one of the joys of working at Marvel is that if something is a good idea, they nurture it and allow it to grow. I'm thrilled to see it. I'm thrilled to see the posters. I imagined that it's a lot of fun."

In a junket for "Hawkeye," the director and executive producer Rhys Thomas told Insider that the Marvel musical idea came from trying to put Hawkeye in the "last place that [he] would want to be" in episode one.

"The idea of him watching a live dancer, you know, tap, dancing his way through, something like the battle of New York just felt really funny to me. And so yeah, what started out as just a funny idea. Like I immediately tried backtracking on it because I suddenly realized what it would mean to make it, but Kevin [Feige, Marvel Studios President], in all fairness to him, said, 'No, we've got to do it now,'" Thomas said.

Thomas added that he would love to do a full MCU musical. "Hawkeye" stars Renner and Hailee Steinfeld told Variety that they would also be interested in doing a full musical.

"We spoke about the idea of an 'Avengers' musical back on the first 'Avengers' [movie], and we were all kind of joking about it," Renner said. "But yeah, ['Rogers'] was just oddly great and awful at the same time, and I've mixed feelings about it."