The Incredible Story Behind Iron Man

Ever Wonder How Iron Man of all Marvel characters was chosen to be the one to launch the Marvel universe? Well, wonder no more, as we do a deep dive into how the Iron Man Movies were made. At the time of writing this script the Marvel Cinematic Universe, henceforth shortened to the MCU, has made about $31 billion at the box office, the most of any film series in history. To put this amount into perspective, that's over 3 times more than Star Wars has made in almost half a century ($10.3 billion), over 4 times the total gross of the entire live-action output of their rival DC ($7.1 billion) and almost 8 times what the Shrek franchise has made since its inception ($4.1 billion)... Really? Shrek? Alrighty then… Going back to Marvel, just the Avengers series on its own, a collection of 4 movies, is considered the 6th most successful film series of all time in terms of box office, grossing in excess of $7 billion. Which eagle-eared fans listening along at home may notice is more than literally every recent DC live-action movie combined. As an aside, because this is really funny, if you go by the numbers, the DC extended universe’s closest box office rival isn’t Marvel, but the Fast & Furious franchise, with the 11 movies featuring Dominic Toretto and his super friends grossing about a $100 million more than the 15 made by DC at the time of writing this. That’s the power of Family. In any event, all of this success began with one movie- Iron Man, a film it can be argued is one of the most important made in recent history with its success and the glut of sequels released in the decades since having, for better or worse, quite literally changed the way movies are made and developed. And, just saying we get that it made Marvel a ton of money, but Hollywood, not every movie or series needs to be a cinematic universe. Sometimes a story can have a satisfying ending and you can then move on to brand new stories. Mmmmkay? However, the success of the initial live-action outing of the Iron Avenger belies how much of a huge pain in the butt this movie, and by extension the entire MCU, was to get off the ground. So let’s now dive into the fascinating story of how the Invincible Iron Man made his way to the big screen. To begin with, something... Author: Karl Smallwood Editor/Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices