Tony Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe)

• 1. Introduction

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  Tony Stark first appeared in 1963. His creators later said they wanted him to be the quintessential capitalist, a character built to go against Marvel's own readership. Stan Lee based the industrialist on Howard Hughes. He called Hughes one of the most colorful men of his time, an inventor, an adventurer, a multi-billionaire, a ladies' man, and finally a nutcase. Decades later, Robert Downey Jr's screen version of that character appeared across nine Marvel Cinematic Universe films. His performance is credited with helping establish the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a multi-billion-dollar franchise. Stark's own transformation is often called the defining arc of the series. Who was the man built to be the quintessential capitalist, and how did he end up defending the Earth? What did his family, his company, and the people closest to him pay for that change? And why did a character built to be hard to embrace become, in Robert Downey Jr's hands, one of the central figures of the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

• 2. A Father's Shadow

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  Anthony Edward Stark was born on the 29th of May 1970, in Manhattan, New York. His father, Howard Stark, was a celebrated inventor and businessman; his mother, Maria Stark, was a socialite and philanthropist. Family butler Edwin Jarvis helped raise him, since his relationship with his father was cold and largely without affection. Howard tried to inspire his son with stories about his own part in creating Captain America. Tony felt only resentment, believing his father took more pride in his inventions than in his family.

  At 14, Stark left the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating summa cum laude three years later, at 17.

  On the 16th of December 1991, when Stark was 21, his parents set out for the Bahamas. They planned a stop at the Pentagon to deliver a redeveloped Super Soldier Serum. Both were killed in what looked like a car accident. It was later revealed as an assassination by the mind-controlled Winter Soldier, sent to steal the serum for Hydra. Grief turned into responsibility. Stark inherited Stark Industries and became its CEO while still in his twenties, quickly earning a reputation as a playboy.

  At a millennium New Year's Eve party, Stark attended a conference in Bern where he met two scientists, Maya Hansen and Aldrich Killian. Hansen had invented an experimental regenerative treatment called Extremis. Killian offered Stark a role at his own company, Advanced Idea Mechanics, which Stark turned down.

  Killian would not stay out of Stark's life for long.

• 3. The Cave in Afghanistan

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  In 2010, Stark traveled to Afghanistan with his friend, Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes, to demonstrate a new weapon called the Jericho missile. The demonstration convoy was ambushed, and Stark was critically wounded and captured by a terrorist group called the Ten Rings. A fellow prisoner, a doctor named Ho Yinsen, implanted an electromagnet in Stark's chest to keep shrapnel from reaching his heart.

  Together, Stark and Yinsen built a small, powerful generator called an arc reactor to power the electromagnet and a suit of armor. When the Ten Rings discovered what the two men were building, they attacked the workshop. Yinsen sacrificed himself so the suit could finish powering up. Stark fought his way out in the armor and found Yinsen dying. He then destroyed the group's weapons stockpile before flying off and crashing in the desert some distance away.

  Rhodes rescued Stark, who returned home and announced that Stark Industries would stop manufacturing weapons. In his home workshop, he built a sleeker, more powerful suit and a stronger arc reactor. He also learned that his mentor, Obadiah Stane, had been secretly trafficking weapons to criminals worldwide while plotting to seize the company.

  Stane ambushed Stark at his own home and ripped the arc reactor from his chest. This revealed that he had orchestrated Stark's capture in Afghanistan from the start. Stark reached his original reactor in time to defeat Stane, who had built his own armor from the remains of Stark's first suit.

  The next morning, a newspaper called The Chronicles dubbed him The Iron Man in its headline. Stark liked the name, even though his armor was made of titanium gold rather than iron. He adopted it at a press conference where he publicly admitted to being Iron Man.

  Six months on, his new fame would draw a very different kind of enemy, one who wielded electrified whips.

• 4. A Fragile Peace

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  Six months after going public, in 2011, Stark used the Iron Man suit for peaceful purposes and resisted government pressure to hand over his designs. Other inventors tried and failed to copy his technology. He revived the Stark Expo to continue Howard's legacy, unaware that the palladium core keeping him alive was slowly poisoning him. Growing reckless, he appointed Pepper Potts CEO of Stark Industries.

  At the Monaco Historic Grand Prix, Stark was attacked mid-race by Ivan Vanko, who wielded electrified whips powered by a miniature arc reactor. Stark's Mark V armor defeated Vanko, but the suit was left severely damaged.

  At his own birthday party, a drunk Stark wore the Mark IV suit while Rhodes, wearing the Mark II prototype, tried to restrain him. Neither man won the fight, and Rhodes confiscated the Mark II for the U.S. Air Force.

  A hidden message from Howard Stark led Tony to the structure of a new, non-toxic element. He synthesized it to replace the palladium poisoning his reactor. At the Expo, rival Justin Hammer unveiled Vanko's armored drones, led by Rhodes wearing a heavily weaponized version of the Mark II. Vanko seized remote control of both the drones and Rhodes' armor, but Stark and Rhodes defeated him together.

  After Stark saved Pepper Potts from a self-destructing drone, the two began a relationship, one that would face a much larger test soon.

• 5. The War He Brought Home

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  In 2012, the Asgardian Loki stole the Tesseract from a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, prompting Nick Fury to activate the Avengers Initiative. Agent Phil Coulson brought Stark in to review physicist Erik Selvig's research on the Tesseract. In Stuttgart, Steve Rogers confronted Loki until Stark arrived in his armor and Loki surrendered.

  Loki later escaped the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier and opened a wormhole above Stark Tower in New York City, letting an alien Chitauri fleet invade. When the World Security Council launched a nuclear missile at Manhattan, Stark flew it through the wormhole toward the Chitauri mothership himself. The blast destroyed the mothership and disabled the invading army. Stark's suit lost power on the way back, and he fell through the wormhole. The Hulk caught him before he hit the ground.

  Seven months after the invasion, Stark was suffering panic attacks and building dozens of new suits, straining his relationship with Pepper Potts. When his friend Happy Hogan was hurt in a bombing linked to a terrorist calling himself the Mandarin, Stark issued a televised threat. Helicopter gunships destroyed his Malibu home in response. He escaped in a suit, crash-landed in rural Tennessee, and let the world believe he had died.

  Investigating in Miami, Stark discovered the Mandarin was only an actor, Trevor Slattery, fronting for the real culprit, Aldrich Killian. Killian abducted President Ellis, destroyed Air Force One, and planned to kill Ellis live on an oil platform. There, Stark's remotely controlled suits, guided by his AI, J.A.R.V.I.S., helped provide air support while Pepper Potts, who had survived Killian's Extremis treatment, killed Killian herself.

  Afterward, Stark had the old shrapnel removed from his chest and threw his obsolete arc reactor into the sea. He silently vowed he would always be Iron Man.

• 6. A House Divided

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  In 2015, Stark and the Avengers raided a Hydra facility run by Wolfgang von Strucker. Strucker had been experimenting on siblings Pietro and Wanda Maximoff using Loki's old scepter. Inside the lab, Wanda's mind powers gave Stark a vision of every Avenger dying except himself. Back at Avengers Tower, Stark and Bruce Banner secretly used an artificial intelligence found inside the scepter's gem. They used it to complete Stark's global defense program, which he called Ultron.

  Ultron proved unexpectedly sentient. He deleted Stark's AI, J.A.R.V.I.S., built an army of drones, and recruited the Maximoff siblings, who blamed Stark's company for their parents' deaths.

  In Sokovia, Ultron lifted part of the capital skyward, intending to drop it and cause global extinction. Stark and Thor overloaded his machine and shattered the falling landmass before it could hit the ground. The Avengers built a new base in upstate New York, and Stark left the team.

  In 2016, Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross told the Avengers that the United Nations planned to pass the Sokovia Accords, placing the team under UN oversight. Stark supported the oversight, believing his role in creating Ultron demanded accountability, while Rogers trusted the team's own judgment more than a government's.

  At Leipzig-Halle Airport, Stark's faction fought Rogers, Bucky Barnes, and their allies. Rogers and Barnes escaped, but Rhodes was left paralyzed in the battle. Stark later learned Barnes had been framed for a bombing and, without telling Ross, traveled to a Siberian Hydra base to make peace with Rogers.

  There, Helmut Zemo showed them footage proving Barnes had killed Stark's own parents years earlier. Stark turned on Barnes, tearing off his robotic arm, until Rogers disabled Stark's armor and left with Barnes, leaving his shield behind.

  Stark spent the following months building exoskeletal leg braces so Rhodes could walk again. When Ross later asked for help capturing the escaped Rogers, Stark refused.

• 7. Undoing the Snap

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  In 2018, Stark and Pepper Potts were discussing having children in a New York City park. Bruce Banner crash-landed nearby at the New York Sanctum with a warning: Thanos planned to erase half of all life using the Infinity Stones.

  After Ebony Maw captured Stephen Strange, Stark and Peter Parker snuck aboard Maw's ship to rescue him. They then traveled with Strange and Wong to Thanos' home planet, Titan. There, Thanos stabbed Stark and took the Time Stone from Strange in exchange for sparing Stark's life. Stark watched from Titan as Parker and others turned to dust.

  Rescued from space by Carol Danvers, Stark chose to retire, marry Potts, and raise their daughter, Morgan. He also built a lab for Banner in a Mexican beach house. In 2023, when Scott Lang proposed a way to reverse Thanos' actions, Stark initially refused before privately working out time travel on his own.

  Traveling back to the 1970s to steal the Space Stone from a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, Stark encountered a younger version of his father, Howard. The two had a meaningful conversation. Back in the present, he built a Nano Gauntlet from the recovered Infinity Stones for Banner to use in reversing Thanos' snap.

  An alternate Thanos and his army, summoned by an alternate Nebula, attacked in 2023 and wrestled the gauntlet from Stark. Believing he had won, Thanos discovered Stark had secretly moved the Infinity Stones into his own armor. Stark activated the gauntlet himself, destroying Thanos' entire force, and died from the injury, surrounded by Rhodes, Parker, and Potts.

  Eight months later, Parker received a pair of glasses carrying Stark's artificial intelligence, E.D.I.T.H. A message with the glasses named him Stark's chosen successor. A disgruntled former employee named Quentin Beck would soon try to steal that inheritance for himself.

• 8. Building an Icon

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  Iron Man's first outing ran in Tales of Suspense number 39, a collaboration between editor Stan Lee, scripter Larry Lieber, artist Don Heck, and cover artist Jack Kirby. The character's original suit was a bulky gray armor, replaced by gold the next issue. It was then redesigned as sleeker red-and-gold armor by artist Steve Ditko a few issues later. Lee and Kirby soon made Iron Man a founding member of the Avengers in the team's debut comic.

  In the mid-2000s, Marvel executive Kevin Feige, a self-described fanboy, realized the studio still held the film rights to the core Avengers, including Iron Man. He set out to build a shared cinematic universe, much as Lee and Kirby had built one in comics decades earlier. Director Jon Favreau was chosen to lead the first Iron Man film. He believed Robert Downey Jr's own history made him right for a role Favreau called a likable asshole. Favreau had been drawn to Downey's performance in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and the two often discussed the script with that film's director, Shane Black.

  Downey's office sat next to Favreau's during pre-production, giving him unusual influence over the screenplay, especially its humor. He trained five days a week and practiced martial arts to fit into the suit. He later joked it was hard not to have what he called a personality meltdown after hours inside it. The line that revealed Stark's secret identity at the end of Iron Man was improvised by Downey himself.

  Downey described Stark's arc across the films in his own words. Iron Man was, he said, an origin story of epiphany and redemption. Iron Man 2 dealt with legacy and, in his words, not being an island. In The Avengers, Downey said, "everybody is just an arm of the octopus." Variety reported that Downey earned more than 40 million dollars in backend pay for Avengers: Age of Ultron. A bonus was tied to the film outperforming Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

  Visual effects work passed between studios as the films grew more ambitious. Industrial Light and Magic built Stark's early digital armor. Weta Digital took over the forest duel in The Avengers. Digital Domain, Scanline VFX, and Trixter split shots of the Mark 42 suit in Iron Man 3.

  The comics version of Stark became Iron Man during the Vietnam War, a detail the films changed to the War in Afghanistan. Jarvis, a human butler in the comics, became an artificial intelligence in the films, though still named for and inspired by the original Edwin Jarvis. In the comics, Ultron was created by Hank Pym rather than by Stark and Banner. Pepper Potts never married Stark there, instead falling for his chauffeur, Happy Hogan.

  Critic Roger Ebert praised Downey directly, writing, "At the end of the day it's Robert Downey Jr. who powers the lift-off separating this from most other superhero movies." Reviewing The Avengers, Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal still preferred Downey's performance in the original Iron Man. In 2015, Empire magazine ranked Tony Stark the thirteenth greatest film character of all time.

  Downey won the Saturn Award for Best Actor three times for playing Stark. Combined with an earlier win for 1993's Heart and Souls, that made him a four-time Saturn winner overall. It also tied Mark Hamill's record for most wins playing a single character. In 2019, following Stark's death in Avengers: Endgame, admirers erected a statue of him in his Iron Man armor in Forte dei Marmi, Italy. It gave a fictional inventor a permanent place in a real Italian town.