Robert Downey Jr. Talks About the Indie Approach to IRON MAN: "Marvel Let the Lunatics Run the Asylum"

There’s a lot of talk about how Marvel took a chance hiring Robert Downey Jr. to star in Iron Man, as he was newly sober and hadn’t had solid work since returning to the big screen. Now we all know that hindsight is 20/20, and the studio’s gamble paid off big time, but it turns out that Downey was also taking a risk being in a Marvel movie, as they were unproven at that point. And the studio had no idea what they had on their hands back in 2007 when the movie was in production. So that first film was completely different than any that came after it.

RDJ talked about the experience, and explained why he didn’t have any fear about jumping into the film, telling THR:

“No, because anyone who knows [Iron Man director] Jon Favreau — I remember seeing Swingers, and that monologue he has, and I was like, ‘And he wrote this? Who is this guy?’ Also, he went to Bronx Science, and he was doing the Improv in Chicago, and we’re both from Queens? We were meant to do this thing. Also, there was no real certainty that this was even going to take off. 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.”

The charm of the first film is what made Marvel what it is today, or at least what it was at its height back in 2019-ish. It seems like maybe we need to get back to those roots.