THE MONEY AND THE GAMBLE

Favreau: Marvel was a studio that people were a bit dismissive of and the superhero genre was one that people felt was at the end of its run. You had The Dark Knight, which cast a very large shadow, but it felt like it was connected to that particular bit of intellectual property and to Chris Nolan. The caliber of superheroes we were talking of bringing out there, it wasn’t a sure thing.

Feige: Marvel didn’t have money on the line. They would have lost the film rights to some of the characters, but it was sort of a great experiment. People forget Iron Man was an independent movie. I had to do a lot. I pitched that movie dozens of times to foreign buyers because we had to get, I don’t remember exactly what the percentage was, but a large percentage of financing it from selling it, pre-selling the foreign. We had a completion bond company.

Arad: I brought in David [Maisel] to be the financial guy, and he wanted a piece of it. I don’t blame him. Everybody has their own ambition. He was a smart financial guy. Basically, they helped a lot with setting up the balance sheets, all these things I have no knowledge, no interest in. My job was to put the movies together and sell the whole idea to the insurance people, to international, but then I had, call it a reputation. I also had very good connections around the world.

Favreau: It was essentially a negative pickup that was being distributed by a studio. It was funded through Marvel putting together financing using the characters as collateral.

Arad: We had partners in Merrill Lynch and Aflac insurance, and I had to become a little bit of a businessman. … We start making Iron Man, and actually we made it right here in Los Angeles.

Downey Jr.: On the Howard Hughes stages in Playa [Vista], a couple of days before we started shooting, we were just running around being an insurance risk, literally playing soft air-gun games with each other because there was so much anticipation of how it was going to go. … The costume never felt silly or weird to me, though Terrence Howard did once tell me that I looked like a ladybug.

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