Iron Man is not coming back

In a behind-the-scenes report on Marvel Studios last month, sources suggested that the panicked MCU overlords were considering resurrecting characters like Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.). It’s not exactly a surprise that Marvel would want to go back to the basics: Tony Stark, in particular, was the keystone of the franchise, and Downey was its face. But bringing Iron Man back would require Downey to agree, and as he enters the Oscars conversation (for Oppenheimer) in his post-MCU chapter, why would he even want to?

Anyway, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige says a Tony Stark return is a no-go. “We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again,” he says in a new profile of Downey for Vanity Fair. “We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way.”

Whether this decision came from Feige’s genuine fidelity to the story or because Downey would never agree to it, we may never know. We do know that Downey didn’t even really want to come back to do reshoots on his final scene for Avengers: Endgame. “We’d already said tearful goodbyes on the last day of shooting. Everybody had moved on emotionally,” director Joe Russo recalled. “We promised him it would be the last time we made him do it—ever.”

“That was a difficult thing for him to do, to come back to pick up that line,” Anthony Russo added. “When he did come back, we were shooting on a stage directly opposite where he auditioned for Tony Stark. So his last line as Tony Stark was shot literally a couple hundred feet from his original audition that got him the role.”

And yes, the godfather of the MCU did have to audition for the part back in the day. “It purely came down to the Marvel board being nervous at putting all of their chips in their future films on somebody who famously had those legal troubles in the past,” Feige shared. He explained that he eventually came up with the idea to have Downey screen test to win over the board, because he “wasn’t very good—and I’m still not great—at taking no for an answer.” Unfortunately for him, if the question is, “Hey, Robert Downey Jr., will you reprise the role of Tony Stark?” It seems like he’s going to have to live with a “no.”