Marvel Studio's Canceled Ideas of Iron Man (Pre-MCU)

 Several Tony Stark projects were tossed around various production studios before Iron Man kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Unlike many other Marvel heroes, Iron Man had never been seen in live-action before Jon Favreau's 2008 MCU starter, even though the idea of ​​bringing the genius, billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist to the big screen had been around since the late 1980s. . Marvel was on the cusp of selling film rights to various characters to other studios amid financial struggles. It's hard to imagine Tony Stark being brought to life by anyone other than Marvel Studios and Robert Downey Jr. Still, audiences almost got to see some very different character variations.

> Between the 1970s and 1990s, Marvel Entertainment Group sold film rights to many Marvel Comics characters, including high-profile characters such as the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Hulk, and Iron Man himself. The deal allowed 20th Century Fox to develop a franchise featuring the mutant X-Men and make several attempts to launch a Fantastic Four film franchise. Universal Studios had the opportunity to create The Incredible Hulk series, which ran from 1977 to 1982, and the 2003 Hulk movie. New Line Cinema produced the Blade trilogy, and Sony took on the Spider-Man films and reboots with varying degrees of success. It wasn't until 2004 that Marvel Studios began its plan to self-finance its own films, giving birth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which would revolutionize the landscape of superhero cinema.

While other production studios have made several movies featuring various Marvel Comics characters, one that never made it to live-action was Iron Man, but it wasn't for lack of trying. The film rights to Iron Man jumped from Universal Pictures to 20th Century Fox and then to New Line Cinema before finally returning to Marvel in November 2005, allowing the fledgling studio to produce Iron Man as the first installment in the MCU. Tony Stark became synonymous with the MCU between Iron Man and his sacrifice in 2019 in Avengers: Endgame, and while his legacy will be felt in the MCU for years to come, it's interesting to look back and think about what could have been.

Universal Pictures' Iron Man

The 1990s were a difficult time for Marvel movies, consisting mostly of straight-to-TV projects like the 1990s Captain America, which bombed in monumental fashion, and an unreleased attempt to revive the Fantastic Four in 1994. In light of the poor after Universal Pictures in acquired the film rights to Iron Man in April 1990, giving Stuart Gordon the opportunity to direct a low-budget film featuring the character, scripted by Ed Neumeier, best known for writing the 1987 hit RoboCop. With Neumeier's experience writing for armored heroes and Gordon's background in horror films like From Beyond and Dolls, it's likely that this version of Iron Man would be darker and more experimental than what Marvel Studios would later create.

Neumeier's script reportedly centered on an older, reclusive Tony Stark, who has given up on the superhero life and taken up residence in a Las Vegas shelter. The first act would feature a global cataclysmic event that would force Stark to dig out his old armor and suit up again after 20 years in retirement. Not much is known about this project, but it's possible to imagine Gordon's frequent collaborator Jeffrey Combs playing the egotistical Stark, perhaps against a more supernatural villain that would fit Gordon and Neumeier's strengths perfectly. Ultimately, however, the project never made it out of pre-production, likely due to Universal's reluctance to produce another potential Marvel flop.

20th Century Fox's The Iron Man

Six years later, Universal all but gave up on the Iron Man project, selling the film rights to 20th Century Fox in April 1996. Jeff Vintar and Iron Man co-creator Stan Lee went to work almost immediately on creating the story. for Fox, with Vintar turning that story into a script that would feature a new sci-fi origin for Tony Stark. The film, tentatively titled "The Iron Man," was produced by Fox alongside the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Daredevil, with the studio envisioning Stark as one of the easier heroes to bring to the big screen. While Nicolas Cage expressed interest in the lead role, it was Tom Cruise of Top Gun and Mission Impossible fame who was Marvel's favorite to play Stark, with his then-wife Nicole Kidman set to star opposite him as Pepper Potts.

The film would focus on a Cold War-era Stark who made weapons as well as the "Rescue Redeemer Armor," a suit designed to provide medical aid to the wounded in the field but modified for military use. An early script also featured the infamous Marvel villain MODOK, who will make his MCU debut in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Despite Fox's project seeming more promising than Universal's previous attempt, Iron Man struggled to find its feet, sitting in pre-production limbo without a big-name star for two years before being rewritten in 1999 by GoldenEye writer Jeffrey Caine. A last-ditch effort to get production off the ground came when Fox approached Quentin Tarantino to direct, but that, unfortunately, went nowhere. With too many superhero projects already on the slate for 20th Century Fox, the potential to see Iron Man on film in the 1990s died when the rights were sold to New Line Cinema in December 1999.

New Line Cinema's Iron Man

New Line Cinema Iron Man has fallen In July 2000, a completely new script was created for New Line Cinema by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossi, who had previously worked together on films such as Aladdin and the 1998 Godzilla attempt. Elliott and Rossi's script would see a more existential Tony Stark living in a "very gray world, in which his money and his personality isolated him." However, a few months later the writing duo left the project and were replaced by Tim McCanlies, who wrote The Iron Giant a year earlier. Interestingly, McCanlies' script shares striking similarities with the MCU's own Iron Man, featuring corporate villains looking to acquire Stark technology and exploit it, and even a cameo by none other than Nick Fury, first played by Samuel L. Jackson in 2009. Iron Man MCU post-credits scene.

Even though McCanlies handed over a finished script by 2002 and the studio approached Joss Whedon to direct (who later wrote and directed The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron), the project still found itself in development hell. In 2004, The Notebook's Nick Cassavetes was hired to direct, and an all-new script was drafted by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who co-wrote 2004's Spider-Man 2 with David Hayter of X-Men and X2: X. -Men United, which pitted Tony Stark against his own father, Howard Stark, who would take on the moniker War Machine, a mantle given to James "Rhodey" Rhodes in Don Cheadle's MCU. New Line seemed to be dragging their feet on the production of their Iron Man project, and with Cassavetes' directorial deal ultimately falling through, they had nowhere to go.

After New Line Cinema returned the film rights to Marvel Studios in 2005, Iron Man was announced as the first project of what would become the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starting from scratch and discarding every previous script. Nearly two decades later, Iron Man has become a household name, bringing in billions of dollars for Marvel Studios and the Walt Disney Company, as well as launching Robert Downey Jr. to superstardom after substance abuse and legal troubles in the 1990s and early 2000s. In the hands of Marvel Studios, Tony Stark transitioned perfectly from the comic book page to the big screen, making it hard to imagine any other version of Iron Man.