How Much Did Val Pay for Avengers Tower in THUNDERBOLTS*? A Property Expert Breaks It Down
In Marvel’s Thunderbolts* we learn that Valentina Allegra de Fontaine bought Avengers Tower. The former headquarters of Tony Stark and Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is now the property of Val and her shadowy organization, O.X.E., giving her the perfect HQ for The New Avengers.
This brings up a fun question, how much would that building actually cost in real-world dollars?
We first saw the iconic skyscraper back in 2012’s The Avengers, and again in Avengers: Age of Ultron. By the time Spider-Man: Homecoming came around, Tony Stark was ready to sell, and the tower was emptied out by Happy Hogan.
That set the stage for the Vulture’s climactic heist, but Marvel fans have been speculating ever since, who bought the place?
Rumors over the years pointed to everyone from Oscorp to the Fantastic Four, but Thunderbolts* made it official that Valentina bought it, and as she says in the movie, it was all about “good optics” and having a public-facing location for the government-backed Sentry program.
So… how much did she fork over for the building?
IGN spoke with Michael T. Cohen, Principal at Williams Equities, a real-life veteran in NYC real estate with four decades of experience, and a self-professed Marvel Comics fan. He offered this ballpark figure: $1.1 billion.
“The metric by which we would measure the value would be price per square foot. So my guess is, there's nowhere where they safely tell you whether it's a million square feet, or a million and a half, or how large it really is.”
Cohen added that since there’s no official square footage provided by Stark Industries or Marvel Studios, it’s a bit of a guessing game, but not without logic. He continued:
“We're kind of shooting in the dark here, without any of the underlying math, but I would say one could easily assume that the Avengers Tower would sell for a billion dollars or more based upon the look of it, the size, and the location.”
Still, it wouldn’t have been a simple transaction. This is, after all, a building that’s been blown up, attacked by aliens, and served as a portal to various interdimensional disasters. That makes it a bit of a risk for insurers and tenants alike.
“It would be very challenging to buy property insurance for Avengers Tower if you were a conventional investor. The Avengers, presumably, don't occupy the entire building… How would you feel about being a tenant in Avengers Tower, say, on the floor beneath them, or above them, or anywhere in the same elevator bank?
“Do the Avengers have a private entrance, or do they ride with the conventional tenants?” he continued. “If you really built Avengers Tower in the middle of the city, there are some very interesting, idiosyncratic considerations one would have to take into account.”
In Thunderbolts*, Val doesn’t keep the name. She rebrands it “The Watchtower,” which nods to The Sentry’s own Watchtower from the comics, a floating fortress perched above Manhattan.
Whether The Watchtower ends up being a place of safety or a monument to disaster remains to be seen—but one thing’s for sure: Val’s new digs didn’t come cheap.