Changes to Iron Man Character Leaves Fans Puzzled
As the dust begins to settle on the enormous, earth shattering deal between Marvel and Disney, we can take a deep and clear breath here on the Geek Beat, and summarize what we already know and what we can hope for. This is going to be an ongoing story, and more developments will probably break after this piece is published, but I figured I’d play it safe and easy this week, and just clarify what I could.
Naturally, our biggest fear is that Disney was going to be purging Marvel of all its down and dirty heroes onscreen and off. We made a lot of jokes about it, but the one thing stressed by Disney and Joe Quesada was that all such weeping and wailing was groundless. Comic Book Resources exhaustively detailed the big conference call where Disney executives stressed again and again that they were uninterested in messing up Marvel’s business, and cited their arrangement with PIXAR as proof of their good intentions. They feel that Marvel Entertainment handles their characters intelligently, and knows how to work with them in other media. Disney was attracted to them for that very reason — and that’s not exactly the first time we’ve heard that since it’s precisely why all kinds of talented people are racing to get involved with Marvel movies.
That was repeated again and again at the Iron Man 2 roundtable. No matter if they’re actors, directors, writers, or producers, everyone loves hanging around the Marvel gurus, and only a madmen would tamper with that formula. The Iron Man Armored Adventures series is popular with children, although there are many people who didn’t like the fact that Tony Stark was a teenager.
When the news first broke, my concern wasn’t that Wolverine or Iron Man would stop drinking, smoking, and sleeping with everything in the comic book universe, it was for the cinematic world that was being so carefully plotted by Kevin Feige and his friends. It’s pretty impossible not to become infected with the enthusiasm Feige, Jon Favreau, and Robert Downey Jr. display towards their fledgling universe, and how eager they are to welcome guys like Kenneth Branagh into it. But to borrow a quote from Brian Heater, the term “Disneyfication” was not created in a vaccuum, and it was impossible not to picture an assembly line of watered down, mythology-drained product. It’s a little harsh of us to jump to that conclusion since the same thing could have happened with Marvel’s existing any-studio-that-will-finance-and-distribute plan. Hell, it could still happen, since we have all of Iron Man and Iron Man 2 to go on. (I liked The Incredible Hulk, but had that been the first film out of the gate, I don’t know if we’d be filled with such blinding hope for the The Avengers, you know?)
