Marvel Looks Back at Iron Man—the Movie That Started It All

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THE RIGHT GUY FOR THE JOB

Favreau: The idea [was to bring] in filmmakers that weren’t necessarily your typical action directors but were more story, character, and comedy people.

Feige: Hiring Favreau, who is now one of the biggest filmmakers in Hollywood, but at the time was an unexpected choice. Going back to my experience watching Sony and Laura Ziskin and Avi hire Sam [Raimi], or Fox hire Bryan Singer, those were not people who had just come out with a big, giant blockbuster and now were doing their next. They were filmmakers who’d done super-interesting movies on a lesser scale coming into a bigger platform. I think that’s always been the way we like to bring in filmmakers.

Arad: Jon Favreau was the right guy for the job, and he was awesome. He’s the right guy for any job, for that matter.

Favreau: We were outsiders. . . . Iron Man was going to be the first one and The Incredible Hulk was going to be closely following. Three filmmakers were hired: myself, Edgar [Wright], and Louis [Leterrier]. Each of us had very different takes on the material.

THEIR FIRST COMIC-CON, 2006

Feige: I think that panel in a large part was to say that Marvel’s making movies themselves now, and here’s the information we have at this point. My favorite part of that is when somebody asked: “Is The Avengers ever possible?” We had no real plans at that point. It was a pipe dream. So much of what we’ve done is based on a pipe dream.

Favreau: There was the sense of having characters available to them of Hulk, Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man—it led to the notion of Avengers as a lighthouse to aim towards. But it was only in very general terms. . . . So we had gone to Comic-Con and talked about what we were planning to do, but at the very beginning we announced a villain that we didn’t end up using.

Feige: Jon announced the Mandarin as the villain in Iron Man.

Downey Jr.: It’s easy to get ahead of yourself. I remember when they said the Mandarin was supposed to be the bad guy in the first Iron Man movie. That’s later.

Feige: I think if we had run before we walked, we would have done all those things we said in the panel—which we didn’t.

THE RIGHT MAN

Downey Jr.: I go back to remembering what an important part of Iron Man Terrence Howard was. He was the first guy on; he was definitely really pushing for me. [Howard was replaced by actor Don Cheadle as Rhodey in Iron Man 2 and for the rest of the franchise.]

Arad: We needed a Tony Stark, and Tony Stark needed to be cool. You know, Hollywood likes them to be 26 and cut, but Tony Stark was not a young kid. He’s like a young adult that has a complexity in the story, and then we got very lucky. We ended up with Robert Downey Jr.

Downey Jr.: I hadn’t seen the screen test, for some reason or another. I finally said, Oh, maybe I should look at this. I looked at the screen test this year, from 10 years ago, and I was like, Yeah, I guess I was the right guy.

Feige: Every decision we made was based on what, creatively, we think would be best for the film-going experience versus what’s the best announcement. What actor was in the hit movie over the weekend? That sort of thing. If it didn’t work, I could go, “Well, we tried. It was the right intentions.”

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