Robert Downey Jr. Changed Marvel Movies With ‘Iron Man’ — and Now He Could Do It Again (2024)

It’s hard to think of an actor managing his career after leaving a franchise better than has Robert Downey Jr. And that makes his announced return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe — in which he’ll be playing the villainous character Dr. Doom in forthcoming “Avengers” sequels, as announced this weekend — come as a surprise.

Downey’s “Iron Man” kicked off of the MCU in 2008, and his character Tony Stark’s death, in 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” was a climax of sorts. “Endgame” represented a culmination of all Marvel storytelling to that point: Downey’s definitive departure meant that this particular set of stories, in which wisecracking defense contractor sat at the emotional center, was done. (Downey seemed so fully out that, as he announced his return on Instagram, no less than his onscreen romantic co-lead Gwyneth Paltrow commented “I don’t get it, are you a baddie now?”)

What immediately followed his departure was a major hiccup, with his film “Dolittle” bombing critically and commercially in early 2020. It was an attempted franchise-starter, and a cynical one: Downey has said since that he was “a little too excited about the deal, and not quite excited enough about the merits of the execution,” and that, after the film, “we had this reset of priorities.” This reset led both to his taking a supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” for which he won an Oscar earlier this year, and his executive-producing and appearing in the fairly audacious, risky HBO literary adaptation “The Sympathizer,” for which he is currently an Emmy nominee and frontrunner. Later this year, Downey will make his debut on Broadway, not in a safe revival of a familiar classic but in a new play by Pulitzer-winner Ayad Akhtar — who, in his previous work, is hardly the kind of writer who plays it safe.

All of this speaks to a curious actor with range, seeking to cash in the credit he’d gotten for making a lot of people a lot of money. Downey’s success during his Marvel period — in which his fame as Iron Man was so great that his other films, from “Due Date” to the “Sherlock Holmes” movies, were solid hits as well — can cause one to forget just how far he’d come. “Iron Man” didn’t just kick off a massive film franchise; it completed a full-scale comeback for Downey, who’d climbed his way out of career purgatory and struggles with addiction. A man who, by the mid-2010s, appeared to be a blue-chip movie star had, upon “Iron Man’s” release, been the risky choice.

A return to Marvel can be seen a few ways. One is a homecoming of sorts: Downey’s potential return has been a subject of speculation since he departed the MCU in 2019. And in an Actors on Actors conversation with Jodie Foster this spring, Downey said that the character of Tony Stark is “just crazily in my DNA. Probably the most like-me character I’ve ever played, even though he’s way cooler than I am.” Notably, Downey is not playing Stark (although the connections between the two characters, in a franchise increasingly characterized by multiverse variants, can be parsed by those eager to dive into lore). But one can understand the appeal of returning to a place that feels comfortable and nostalgic, the place one got to be oneself, but cooler.

It shouldn’t be lost, too, that Downey’s return gets Marvel out of a bind: The announced “Avengers” sequels had been planned to feature Jonathan Majors’ Kang character, so much so that the film now called “Avengers: Doomsday” was first announced as “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.” (Marvel parted ways with Majors last year, mere hours after he was convicted of misdemeanor assault and harassment of an ex-girlfriend.) And, prior to this past weekend’s titanic box-office results for “Deadpool & Wolverine” — the success of which comes in large part from its subversion and satirical mockery of Marvel tropes — the studio’s fortunes had seemed to be flagging, with film after film (and TV shows too) met with muted enthusiasm and disappointing returns. Downey is a tie back to what fans might see as Marvel’s golden age.

Maybe, too, Downey sees an opportunity, and not just to make the kind of money that could fund future Broadway stints and oddball TV series. His first run of Marvel films traded on the persona Downey had established from the earliest days of his career: Tony Stark is quick-witted, a patter artist who seems at first to have a casual relationship with morality only to reveal depths of soulfulness underneath. That’s the Downey from “Less Than Zero,” from “Home for the Holidays,” from “Ally McBeal”; it’s the kind of work he was doing on the comeback trail in “Zodiac,” released just a year before “Iron Man” supercharged his career.

Since reorienting himself post-“Dolittle,” Downey has appeared in two projects that have asked him to use slightly different skills. In “Oppenheimer,” Downey’s cool-to-the-touch remove and his sharpness is oriented toward malice and resentment. And on “The Sympathizer,” he vacillates among approaches, from fey insinuation to aggro dominance, as he plays four different characters (talk about a multiverse!). All of that show’s Downeys represent the white American power structure the show’s Vietnamese protagonist (Hoa Xuande) must confront.

All of which, potentially, might work toward something we haven’t yet seen from Downey in a big-budget offering, something beyond the Tony Stark persona. Returning to the site of past glories may, when “Doomsday” comes out, look like a regression, a way to dodge the more challenging material to which Downey had seemed committed. Or it may give a long-running franchise a welcome shot of energy. Downey’s already revitalized his own career, twice over — first in 2008, when his and Marvel’s fortunes rose together, then in the 2020s, as he made his own way. Maybe he has a little magic to spare.