If you can kindly lift your head from the kiddie pool and stop bobbing for Tobeys and Andrews in the Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer for just a couple of minutes, you might notice that—hey!—there's already another Marvel something available to the streaming public. Focus on the now, folks.
If you haven't been paying attention, the show I'm talking about is Hawkeye, which debuted its first two episodes on Disney+ Wednesday morning. In Episode One, we're reintroduced to Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), who is—possibly like you—a bit tired of superhero nonsense, having fought the intergalactic space thumb who blipped away his family. Early on, the poor guy just wants to enjoy a Broadway show with his family. The show he chooses? Well, he gets a hot ticket for Steve Rogers: The Musical, which, as we're supposed to understand, chronicles the life and times of the long-since gone Cap (the Chris Evans one!) via song and dance.
Since this is a Disney+ jam without the apparently boundless runtime of, say, Eternals, we're only treated to one grand, shining number from the show. It's called, "I Could Do This All Day," set to a Broadwayified version of the final battle we saw in The Avengers. I'm here to tell you that—I'm almost afraid to say—it's kind of good? The song itself, mainly performed by the Steve Rogers character, is an absolute earworm ("I could do this all... DAYYY!") that I haven't been able to purge from my head since seeing it. And even though the dancing/play-fighting/intense facial expressions are intentionally corny, the whole thing is legit enough to make you think that a Marvel musical could actually work. (Just not on Broadway. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark ruined it for the rest of us.)
Listen: We're at 26 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. There will presumably be another 26 before it's all said and done. With Hawkeye ever-so-slightly introducing the idea of a show-tuned MCU to its loyal fans, one of them will be a movie musical. We're calling it. Maybe we're even begging for it?
Baz Luhrmann will direct, of course, because his colors and noise and fireworks already look like they fell out of the back half of whatever Phase of the MCU we're in. Maybe Lin-Manuel Miranda, if Kevin Feige will agree to his demands to become the new omnipresent Stan Lee cameo. We'd like to say that any number of musically gifted famous individuals will lead this hypothetical project—maybe Hugh Jackman returns for a Wolverine musical, or Emma Stone poofs through the multiverse as a tap-dancing Spider-Gwen—but we all know that one already-introduced superhero will break musical ground: Harry Styles.
You heard it here first. Whenever Harry Styles's Starfox, who showed up in Eternals, gets his solo movie, it will—or, at the very least, should—be a musical movie. It could even just feature current Harry Styles songs. Or new ones. We don't care. Which address at Marvel takes unsolicited scripts?
