Is Iron Man the most culturally significant Marvel film ever made?

‘Iron Man’ spawned an industry behemoth – but success was not guaranteed on Jon Favreau’s risky superhero flick. As the 2008 film enters the pantheon of American cinematic landmarks alongside ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘Citizen Kane’, Geoffrey Macnab looks at how its scandalous star helped secure its triumph

Robert Downey Jr in ‘Iron Man’ (Shutterstock)

Robert Downey Jr is arrested. Again. He’s in rehab; he’s in court; he’s in prison; he has violated probation. In the late 1990s, the American actor was a subject of morbid fascination for the media. His brilliant Oscar-nominated performance as the lead in Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin (1992) was all but forgotten amid the ongoing scandals about his drug taking, alcoholism and erratic behaviour.

By the time Downey Jr was cast in Iron Man in late 2006, the actor had been “clean” for a number of years. His casting, however, still prompted speculation that this superhero flick could be “the riskiest film in history”. The 2008 movie was the first ever self-financed Marvel film, but the risk paid off. Its release spawned an industry behemoth. Iron Man was a crucial project for Marvel – a “make or break” moment, as its producer and now studio president Kevin Feige later described it. It made sense then that company executives did not want damaged goods such as Downey Jr, already in his early forties, playing the starring role of Tony Stark. “They were scared of him. They told me no, I couldn’t hire him, and it felt like too big of a risk,” director Jon Favreau told Superherohype in 2008. “They wanted me to go with somebody younger and somebody with less of a reputation.”

Fifteen years on, Iron Man has now been added to the US Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, which seeks to preserve works of cultural importance for future generations. While it isn’t the only superhero film in the pantheon – Christopher Reeve’s Superman (1978) is in there, as is Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) – Iron Man is the first Marvel entry to be feted. Despite Martin Scorsese’s 2019 protest that superhero films aren’t “cinema”, there you have it: Iron Man bracketed alongside Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and Scorsese’s very own Goodfellas (1990) as landmarks in American film history.