Given his prominence in the MCU, it’s strange to think Robert Downey Jr. almost didn’t get the role of Iron Man, but according to David Maisel, that’s exactly what happened.
Most Marvel fans worth their salt are familiar with Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios. Before Feige, the often forgotten Maisel was the original president and founder of the MCU as we know it today. “Most people right now think Kevin started the studio,” Maisel recently told The New Yorker. “They don’t know me at all.” Despite that level of relative anonymity, Maisel told the publication how he was responsible for the idea that became the MCU, and played an integral part in getting Downey Jr. the role of Tony Stark.
After getting his MBA at Harvard, Maisel eventually transitioned from working at consulting firms to working for Hollywood agent, Michael Ovitz. Ovitz would later become the president of Disney for a short while, and brought Maisel along for the ride. While working at Disney, Maisel learned “the power of franchises,” and soon, he had the idea that Marvel should build its own movie franchise.
Hey, if I can get a movie I can believe in, and every movie after that one is a sequel or a quasi-sequel — the same characters show up — then it can go on forever. Because it’s not 30 new movies. It’s one movie and 29 sequels. What we call a universe.
Eventually, Maisel got the go-ahead from Marvel Entertainment’s then-CEO, Issac “Ike” Perlmutter, and amassed $525 million — enough to finance four movies — in risk-free financing from Merill Lynch. With this newfound financial freedom, Maisel landed on an Iron Man film as the springboard for the MCU, after focus groups of children said he was their favorite Marvel hero.
After Jon Favreau was was hired to direct the film, two actors were left competing for the role of Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr. and Timothy Olyphant. Despite Downey Jr.’s poor reputation in Hollywood following his arrest in 1996 and multiple rehab visits, Maisel maintained that the actor was best for the role. The rest of the Marvel board were hesitant to cast Downey Jr. in such a prominent role, but Maisel ultimately convinced them. The rest, as they say, is history.
“My board thought I was crazy to put the future of the company in the hands of an addict. I helped them understand how great he was for the role. We all had confidence that he was clean and would stay clean.”
Maisel would later organize the sale of Marvel to Disney, to the tune of $4 billion. “I wanted to leave and live a life,” he told The New Yorker; he promoted Feige to the position of the studio’s president and resigned, pocketing a cool $50 million. Although his contributions to the MCU aren’t as celebrated as Feige’s, we have Maisel to thank for both the MCU as a concept and Downey Jr as Tony Stark.
