Robert Downey Jr. explains how making Iron Man was a little bit indie
The 2008 Marvel film went on to gross $585.8 million at the box office
A little over four years ago (!), Martin Scorsese made a now-infamous pronouncement: Marvel movies are “not cinema.” In fact, they’re more like theme parks, in the Killers Of The Flower Moon director’s eye. That first shot kicked off a war as virulent as the one the Avengers had to fight against Thanos himself. It’s 2024 now, and we really thought we’d heard it all: Marvel movies are superior to arthouse films because they do better at the box office, according to a shady video from director Joe Russo. Marvel movies are worse than arthouse films because they’re a “cut and paste” of each other that “turned us into zombies a bit,” in the words of director Denis Villeneuve. The list goes on.
But just when we thought this war would end in an eternally unbreakable stalemate, Robert Downey Jr. dropped a bomb the likes of which the discourse has never seen before: Marvel movies—at least his own Iron Man—did have something in common with arthouse films. At least at the very beginning.
In a recent roundtable with The Hollywood Reporter, Downey was asked a now pretty standard question: “you started out in indies, then Marvel approached you with Iron Man… Did you pause about signing up for a studio superhero movie?” “There was no real certainty that this was even going to take off,” the actor responded. “Iron Man was a second-tier hero. They [Marvel] let the lunatics run the asylum for a little while, so it was completely an indie approach to a genre movie to begin with.”
It’s not as crazy as it sounds. It’s almost impossible to fathom now, but when Downey initially teamed with director Jon Favreau for the 2008 film, there was no MCU to speak of (much less go to war over). It genuinely was a gamble by the studio—did anyone actually care about superheroes not named Batman or Superman? The film only received a $140 million budget, but went on to gross a whopping $585.8 million at the box office (via Box Office Mojo). Compare that to the $356 million budget and $2.8 billion gross for Avengers: Endgame, Downey’s last MCU movie, and, well, the rest is history.