The trailer for Avengers: Endgame showed Tony Stark stranded on an alien spaceship light years from home. It seemed to be out of fuel and, as he explained, life support was running low. That, combined with the fact that Robert Downey Jr.’s contract with Marvel Studios expires with Endgame has given many fans reason to suspect we’ll be seeing his final appearance as Stark this April. If that were the case, you’d expect Spider-Man: Far From Home to touch upon his death. After all, Tony was a huge influence on the MCU Spider-Man and his death would surely hit the young hero hard.
This makes his absence from the first Far From Home trailer very ominous. Towards the beginning, we see Happy Hogan delivering an outsized novelty check from the Stark Relief Foundation. First mentioned in Age of Ultron, this was created by Tony in order to deal with the damage caused by the large scale battles the Avengers fight in. But despite this being Stark’s own foundation, the check in the Far From Home trailer is signed by Pepper Potts. Is the fact that Stark hasn’t signed the check himself a clue that he’s not going to be around when Far From Home happens?
I think there’s a decent chance that this is the case, but I also don’t think the cheque’s conclusive proof. As Jamie Lovett at ComicBook.com points out, Pepper Potts was named CEO of Stark Industries in Iron Man 2, meaning that she’d hold the purse-strings of any corporate payouts (which the foundation may well fall under). In addition, it’s perhaps a relief that the organization isn’t called the Tony Stark Memorial Foundation or something similarly doom-like. All that said, the fact that we’ve seen Happy Hogan and heard reports of Gwyneth Paltrow being spotted on set, but there being no sign of Robert Downey Jr., doesn’t exactly bode well.
Regardless, by the time Spider-Man: Far From Home swings into cinemas on July 5th, we’ll all know the fate of Tony Stark, as RDJ’s set to reprise the role for presumably the final time in Avengers: Endgame, which arrives on April 26th.
