The Internet and Marvel Fandom are so obsessed with Avengers and Iron Man, it’s easy to forget that the whole thing almost didn’t happen because no one thought it was a good idea.
A Reddit user recently brought up the fact that Iron Man was once considered such a minor character when Marvel Studios began developing the 2008 film that it took a lot of convincing to get it across the line.
According to associate producer Jeremy Latcham, “we went after about 30 writers and they all passed.” They said they were uninterested in the project because of the “relative obscurity” of the character and the fact it was a “solely Marvel production.” When the film finally had a script, even the rewrites faced multiple rejections.
![Iron Man - Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8hYlB38asDY/hqdefault.jpg)
In a Tumblr post about Deadpool from 2016, Marvel Comics Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada explained that in the early days of Iron Man the team conducted focus groups. “One of the major takeaways was that kids who had zero knowledge of the character and had no interest in him because they thought he was a robot,” he wrote.
Quesada also explained that in early 2007, “Marvel assigned a small group of us to create what would eventually be called Iron Man Advertorials,” which were a series of animated shorts introduced Iron Man to younger viewers using fan favourites like Spider-Man and The Hulk to “show how cool” he was.
Pretty humble beginnings for a film which ended up grossing over $585 million on a $140 million budget, and kicked off a long list of cult Avengers films.
If Marvel wasn’t able to convince the writers and the audience of Iron Man’s superhero qualities, would we have all the films we do today?
Some things we will never know. Including what Iron Man would have been like if Nicholas Cage or Tom Cruise landed the role, or if Tarantino directed the film like people once thought they might.
Perhaps it’s best not to ask “what if?”