“Big man in a suit of armor – take that off, what are you?” To which Tony Stark quickly replies: “Genius. Billionaire. Playboy. Philanthropist.”
You know the scene, of course; it’s lifted from midway through The Avengers, when Tony and Captain America butt heads, and the latter delivers a piece of foreshadowing (“you’re not the man to lay down on a wire”) that would inevitably loom large over Avengers: Endgame.
But on a pure character level, it’s the “genius” element that drew Kevin Feige to Tony Stark – so much so that he was willing to roll the dice and build an entire cinematic universe around Robert Downey Jr.’s man in the can. While Thor and Captain America each had their roles to play in Marvel’s Infinity Saga, the fact that the MCU flickered into life with 2008’s Iron Man underlines Feige’s faith in Tony Stark and his ability to draw in the crowds.
And that’s exactly what the Marvel Studios president told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview.
We really believed in the character of Tony Stark. We believed in being able to do a version of a hero that people hadn’t seen before — the redemptive arc that he has through the film — and the notion that it’s not superpowers, it’s a vehicle, and the vehicle sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. That his intellect is the superpower, we thought was very interesting. The notion of epic storytelling that encompasses the same characters through many different periods. We could begin to blend them together and build a universe on the big screen the way it exists in the comic book universe.
To add a little perspective, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man debuted just a few short months before The Dark Knight (still widely considered to be the best comic book movie of all time), and here we are, more than 10 years later, and the legend of Tony Stark has become an undisputed cornerstone of the modern superhero era.
Feige added:
For the longest time, Avengers [the first Marvel release to bring together a large group of its superheroes] was our horizon line, what we were aiming for. [It was] the greatest thing that ever happened to us.
The $2.7 billion titan that is Avengers: Endgame will be available on Disney+ at launch. That’s tomorrow, November 12th, in select territories (United States, Canada, and the Netherlands), while those in the UK will have to wait until March of next year before Disney’s streaming service makes its debut.