Cast your mind back to the formative years of the MCU and Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, at a time when talk of a shared cinematic space was reserved for end-credits and subsequently channelled through Samuel L. Jackson’s glowering Nick Fury.
It was here that Marvel introduced Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark to the moviegoing masses, a character who would very much go on to become the anchor point of this most successful of cinematic universes. An instant hit with fans, RDJ’s portrayal of Marvel’s genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist was effortless at times, spewing smart quips even when doing battle with former friend and business partner, Obadiah Stane (AKA the Iron Monger).
Indeed, by the time we reached the finale of Favreau’s actioner, Tony Stark was ostensibly waging war against his doppelgänger, and it didn’t take long for observers to pinpoint a slightly similar arc in Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man seven years later.
Why the mirror-image villains? Well, according to Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige, it draws more empathy from the audience. Per Screen Rant:
“Clearly we will get to that [non-doppelganger match ups]… You want to have characters that inhabit the same world when introducing a new world, a new mythology for lack of a better term. You want to explore that as much as you can.”
Applying this logic to Doctor Strange, Feige went on to reveal that “when you’re teaching an audience about sorcerers and that reality and you’re going to talk about the past anyway and you’re going to get into their history anyway, much better to tie-in your bad guy with that instead of laying all this groundwork of parallel dimensions and sorcery and say, by the way, a meteor hit on the other side of the world, it went under the water, and this evil thing developed. What does that have to do with magic? Nothing… That’s not the way we’ve developed them up to this point.”
Doctor Strange hits on November 4.
