Is Robert Downey Jr.’s Oscar win awful news for Marvel Studios?

For a long while there, it looked like Marvel and Robert Downey Jr. had a practically symbiotic relationship, one which was mutually beneficial… Until it suddenly wasn’t.

Downey’s universally adored performance as Iron Man helped steer the MCU to meteoric greatness for its first 11 years of existence, while Marvel helped restore Downey’s once-ruined reputation and reinstall him in Hollywood as one of the most lucrative actors around. And then Tony Stark died in Avengers: Endgame. Marvel’s never been the same since and that looked to be true of Downey’s career as well when he followed up years of box office success with 2020’s dire Doolittle.

Enter Oppenheimer, with Downey’s left-field, against-type casting as Lewis Strauss making him a shoe-in for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar since last summer. Sure enough, the 96th Academy Awards went and gave the golden gong to the man who once pretended to pee in his superhero suit in Iron Man 2. It’s a tremendous and well-deserved achievement, no doubt about it, but it may have just put the final nail in the coffin of Downey’s potential MCU comeback.

Downey’s Oscar acceptance speech makes clear an MCU return is unlikely to happen

Although he may have swaggered onto the stage like Tony Stark attending one of his own Stark Expos, Downey’s Oscar acceptance speech offered yet another, and perhaps the ultimate, reminder that he’s days as the Armored Avenger really are over. “Here’s my little secret,” Downey said when thanking director Christopher Nolan and producer Emma Thomas for casting him in the first place. “I needed this job more than it needed me.”

This admission echoes similar comments Downey has made throughout this awards season in which the actor paints himself as someone who needed a serious leg-up in terms of earning the industry’s respect and credibility amongst his peers after so long making mainstream blockbusters. That’s not to say that Downey is dismissive of his work for Marvel, as he personally believes he gave some of his “best work” while playing Iron Man. The problem, for him, is that few, outside of diehard MCU fans, recognized that.

“I felt so exposed after being in the cocoon of Marvel where I think I did some of the best work I will ever do, but it went a little bit unnoticed because of the genre,” Downey said on an episode of Rob Lowe’s podcast, Literally!.

Now that he has unarguably broken out of his Marvel cocoon and been reborn as an Oscar-winning character actor (this was Downey’s third nomination but first win), it seems there’s little chance that he would decide to come back for that much hoped for multiversal cameo later down the line. It was widely reported last year that Marvel Studios was considering bringing back Downey, Chris Evans, and Scarlett Johansson to boost flagging interest in the franchise, a rumor that even Kevin Feige point-blank denying it couldn’t destroy. It just made sense, after all, for Downey to turn up in Avengers: Secret Wars for a fan-pleasing reprisal.

However, with RDJ clearly eager to distance himself from Marvel as much as he can — even if he remains proud of his performance across his 10 MCU movies — and with his Oscar win no doubt launching a hundred different job offers, there really seems no way that he’ll return as Iron Man for the remainder of the Multiverse Saga. Now there’s a stark truth for you.