Mega-Producer Joel Silver Convinced Robert Downey Jr. To Deliver One Of Avengers: Endgame's Best Lines
When Jon Favreau made "Iron Man" in 2008, he, like many, assumed it might be the last time audiences ever saw the character on the big screen. As such, he included a few cute in-jokes that were never really meant to be extrapolated into future movies. One was the post-credits stinger when Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) was approached by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) about joining a team called the Avengers Initiative. Favreau has admitted in interviews that it was meant to be nothing more than a wink to fans, and not a promise of things to come.
The other in-joke was the film's last line of dialogue. When asked if he knew anything about the mysterious armor-clad superhero that had been rocketing around the world disarming terrorists, Tony Stark winked and said out loud "I am Iron Man." In superhero comics, his secret identity would have been vital. With that single line of dialogue, the future Marvel Cinematic Universe had to exist in a world where secret identities aren't a part of superhero lore.
At the end of the 19th film in the MCU, Anthony and Joe Russo's "Avengers: Endgame," Iron Man — still in the superhero business — comes into possession of six magical stones that can grant wishes. He had just wrested them from an evil space alien hellbent on killing half the population of the universe. Iron Man's last wish is to kill the space alien and his army, but the magic is so powerful, it kills him as well. Before he deals the death blow, he reprises his 2008 line and says, "I am Iron Man."
According to Joe Russo on a 2019 episode of the CinemaBlend podcast, Downey didn't want to say the line. It took a famous Hollywood bigwig to change his mind.
Reshoots
Incidentally, the "I am Iron Man" line from 2008 was, as previously written about in the pages of /Film, improvised by Robert Downey, Jr.
The CinemaBlend article points out that the final deathblow in "Endgame" scene was, in fact, a reshoot, and might have been the last scene filmed for the movie. Downey's objections to saying "I am Iron Man" again had less to do with the line itself or the context of the movie, but with the fact that he was essentially exhausted. He had appeared as Tony Stark in nine feature films and was ready to finally relax and not get into the character's headspace anymore.
Joe Russo recalled the dinner where he pitched the line to his actor, and finding himself lucky to be within earshot of legendary producer Joel Silver, the producer of films like "Xanadu," and some of the more notable action pictures of the 1980s ("Predator," "Commando," "Lethal Weapon," "Die Hard," "Road House," and "Demolition Man" are all on his résumé). Russo was grateful for the encounter, as it seemed to be Silver's insistence that caused Downey to repeat the 11-year-old improvisation. Russo said:
"I had dinner with [Downey] like two weeks before we were supposed to shoot it. And he was like, 'I don't know. I don't really want to go back and get into that emotional state. It'll take ... it's hard.' And crazily enough, Joel Silver, the producer, was at the dinner. He's an old buddy of Robert's. And Joel jumps in and he's like, 'Robert, what are you talking about? That's the greatest line I've ever heard! You gotta say this line! You have to do this!' So thank God that Joel Silver was at dinner, because he helped us talk Robert into doing that line."
The writer
The screenplay for "Avengers: Endgame" is credited to Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, but, as everyone knows, dozens of writers tend to reshape a script during production. Anthony Russo told CinemaBlend that one of the film's editors, Jeffrey Ford, came up with the idea for Tony Stark to repeat "I am Iron Man" while the film was already in post-production. Joe recalled the scene clearly, saying:
"We were sitting on our editorial, and we were reworking that sequence, and Thanos says 'I am inevitable.' And we were like, 'We need a response to that. What is the response to that?' And our editor said, 'What about I am Iron Man?' And we were like, 'That's it!'"
Anthony immediately said, "We must shoot that, we have to shoot that!" It was unclear what, if anything, Iron Man originally said in that space, or even if he had spared the life of Thanos (Josh Brolin), the evil murderous alien mentioned above.
Sparing Thanos? Such dramatic alteration to the ending of "Endgame" has not made its way to the public, however, so we can only conjecture. But to editorialize (and maybe to deliberately raise some hackles): it seems to this author that Iron Man sparing the villain's life — and instead sacrificing himself to a cast magic spell that improved the state of the universe — would be a more heroic act than merely murdering thousands of battlefield combatants. As far as anyone knows, that was one of the original ideas in place of "I am Iron Man."
But perhaps that is an unpopular view. The ending, as it appeared in the final cut of "Endgame" must have been satisfying to at least a few people; it's the second highest-grossing film of all time.