Hawkeye deals with a lot of things in the first two episodes and fans have to catch up to the narrative before it moves on with the story. We are introduced to the character of Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop with a little bit of backstory towards her fascination with Hawkeye. The first episode has a lot of reference to the events of 2012’s The Avengers and this is indicated even in the Rogers: The Musical. While we get to witness a bit of the musical, there are certain things that take place in this musical that seem to be off. In Hawkeye, we saw that Rogers: The Musical had Ant-Man. So, why Ant-Man was in the Rogers Musical when it is supposed to depict the events of 2012’s New York battle?
Hawkeye Episode 1
Fans were excited to see what the Rogers: The Musical was going to be like and it seems we got a hint on it with the very first episode itself. The episode is heavily influenced by references to the events of the past events of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as both the characters have been majorly influenced by those events. Kate Bishop’s life was saved by Hawkeye himself back during the events of the 2012 New York battle as he was able to prevent a Chitauri soldier from attacking her.
This clearly had a massive impact on her and drove her to become like her favorite Avenger due to which she took up archery amongst other Martial arts. Meanwhile, as the world celebrates its heroes, Clint Barton is forced to go through all the trauma once again. This was more apparent when he was watching Rogers: The Musical with his kids and he puts off his hearing aid so that he doesn’t have to listen to it. Barton is reminded of his friend and colleague Natasha Romanoff when the actress playing her appears on stage. But adding insult to the injury is the presence of Ant-Man in the musical.
Ant-Man in Rogers: The Musical
As the musical takes place we see Clint lost in thoughts when his daughter Lila Burton, played by Ava Russo tries to gather his attention. She asks if he is watching it or not and he replies by saying that he was there and he is quick to point out who wasn’t there. He points at one of the actors who was wearing a t-shirt with the Pym particles designed on it. This clearly indicates that the general public thinks how Ant-Man was present during the 2012 New York battle.
Even the lyrics for the character go as follows:
…
And when Ant-Man flies
You won’t hear a sound
The battle’s just begun….
Maybe it’s just a mistake since, or perhaps a joke since no one would really know even if Hank Pym suited up as Ant-Man and fought in the battle.
While fans might be wondering the reason behind this addition, the creators behind the series have talked about this and clarified that this was not something rather serious. The director of the series, Rhys Thomas mentioned that the entire idea of the broadway show was meant to be a funny thing in itself. He mentioned:
Once your brain starts running to, ‘OK, we’re going to make this musical. How good is this musical?’ Ultimately, again, the original conception of this, for me, was I sort of just had this image of Jeremy’s world-weary face sitting in a Broadway theater watching it. That was ultimately it. So then it just became about building off that. Who would he NOT want to see playing him? What character would… you know, putting Ant-Man in there. That feels funny. It was just all about, again, anything that annoys Clint, that felt right.
Also did you realize that the stage actor playing Ant-Man is Asian? Now, this might be nothing, but what if it is a nod to Zack Snyder’s Justice League? In recent times, a lot of MCU projects have been referencing Zack Snyder’s work. We all know that Zheng Kai played Ryan Choi in ZSJL, and Snyder even wanted him to lead his own movie as The Atom (DC counterpart of Ant-Man). So I’d say that this musical could be a nice little nod to The Atom, along with Ant-Man.
While the writers might have introduced this entire narrative to annoy Clint Barton we can see this working as a heroic moment for Ant-Man too as Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang wasn’t really popular. This was apparent from the scene in the series where we saw the character not being identified by a couple of kids when they were taking a selfie with the Smart Hulk. In a larger narrative, this could mean that someone might have seen his presence during the 2012 events when the character travels back in time to the 2012 event in Avengers: Endgame.
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