A short while ago there were rumblings that Disney, increasingly desperate to turn around the quality and interest decline in the MCU, may have been considering bringing back dead/retired characters like Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark, Chris Evans’ Steven Rogers and Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, somehow, for future movies.
The suggestions seemed like news to Evans and Johansson. She laughed it off wondering if it would a zombie movie (Marvel Zombies are indeed a thing), and Evans said he hadn’t talked about the idea with anyone at Marvel.
But now it’s the Marvel side of things chiming in, as Kevin Feige was asked about this idea directly in Vanity Fair, specifically regarding bringing back RDJ’s Tony Stark:
“We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again,” Feige says. “We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way.”
Joe Russo, co-director of Avengers: Endgame, went on to say that after they made him reshoot his single “And I am Iron Man” final line, they promised they’d never make him do it again. Meanwhile, RDJ, being asked about Tony Stark a lot on his Oppenheimer Oscar tour, has said pretty explicitly that he’s not coming back to the role, and there have been strong implications he was concerned he stayed in that role as long as he had, as he was concerned about missing a step when he came back to a “normal” prestige film like Oppenheimer. I think we can all agree that didn’t happen.
As for what the Marvel plan actually is, it seems to be some twisted amalgam of Kang and the surviving current heroes, the new Fantastic Four, and X-Men, both from FOX and possibly new versions specifically for the MCU down the line. There is not a lot of coherence to it, and we have recently hit a low point with The Marvels tanking at the box office like no MCU movie ever has. And despite a fantastic Loki finale, the MCU’s Disney Plus streaming ambitions have gone way overboard to the point where Disney admits they need to be scaled down.
There of course could have been many ways for RDJ, Evans and Johansson to return to those roles. Comic books obviously revive dead characters all the time, and at the base level here, we have time travel (which saved Loki and Gamora) and now the multiverse, where you could pull some sort of alternate Iron Man/Captain America/Black Widow played by the same actor out of some other universe.
Instead, Marvel has been building up successors to these roles, though we don’t have a full scope of how that will go yet, and it seems unlikely recapture the magic of the original. Captain America quite literally has a new face to go with the name in the form of Sam Wilson, who will get his own movie next year. Natasha is more or less being succeeded by her sister Yelena. Who’s replacing Iron Man? It feels like a combination. Peter Parker seems like he may end up the next Avengers leader down the road. We have Ironheart coming as a series. We have War Machine in Armor Wars eventually. But no, the true magic of RDJ’s Stark is unlikely to ever be repeated.
So, no ace from its sleeve from Marvel here, not that I believe pulling a trick like that would have even played well among audiences in the first place.
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