Ten years is a lifetime in the movie industry.
Back in 2008, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was little more than a distant dream housed up in the mind of Kevin Feige, who was busy crafting the first Iron Man movie alongside Jon Favreau – for the record, he’s since signed on to write and executive produce the first live-action Star Wars TV series for Disney and Lucasfilm.
But now that the MCU is approaching its 10th anniversary, and includes such wonderfully diverse movies as Black Panther, it’s fair to say that Iron Man has not aged particularly well. In fact, in the eyes of Joe Robert Cole, co-writer of Panther, Favreau’s film wouldn’t sit well with modern-day audiences as the outward misogyny and crude, playboy attitude that makes up Tony Stark – the mid-flight pole dance, the snarky scene with Christine Everhart’s reporter…you name it – would be at odds with the #MeToo movement.
Think about where we are now, with this very vapid, unintelligent president and our world is crackling on the edges because of that. Think back to Tony Stark, him being douchey and being okay. If that character, Stark, was created in a movie today, I wonder if the response would be like, ‘Oh, it’s cool that he’s douchey and disrespectful to women … That’s fine.’ I think we’re at a different place. I think it’s a better place.
Nicole Perlman, co-writer of Captain Marvel, echoed that sentiment, before noting that a select number of countries are intentionally omitted from the ‘bad guy list’ in order to negate the possibility of offending a target audience.
At one of the franchises that I’ve helped on — which Joe, you will know — there’s a whole thing about which countries you can’t have be the bad guys because they buy a lot of movie tickets.
Looking to the future, both Black Panther and Iron Man will share the screen once again thanks to the back-to-back release of Infinity War and Avengers 4, the latter of which will be with us on May 3rd, 2019.
