Iron Man is still one of the most popular Marvel heroes in the public consciousness despite not appearing on screen in a movie since "Spider-Man: Far From Home," and that popularity doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. The dream team of director Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. defined the earliest days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but their partnership as filmmaker and star actually concluded after "Iron Man 2," and some fans are surprised by that when they revisit the Avenger's first
trilogy of movies. Well, Favreau had a good reason to step away from the Marvel movie scene after his second outing with Tony Stark, and it has everything to do with the break-neck pace the MCU movies had in those days.
2008's "Iron Man" changed the course of the superhero movie genre along with Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," and Robert Downey Jr.'s debut as the character grossed $585 million at the box office, which meant Marvel and Paramount Pictures probably wanted to get rolling on a sequel as quickly as possible. The Walt Disney Corporation bought the entirety of Marvel Entertainment in 2009, which only increased the pressure to produce a sequel as quickly as possible. With the studio trying to get "Iron Man 2" out into the world at the speed of sound, the management's glare on the production was already multiple times more intense than it was for the first "Iron Man," and Favreau carried that burden as the director.
It's reasonable for Favreau to look at how complicated this type of superhero moviemaking was going to get and head for the hills (only to be confronted with the chaos of modern Star Wars properties years down the road!), and that's not a slight at Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios, or Robert Downey Jr. at all. The director still makes cameo appearances as Happy Hogan, even as recently as last year's "Deadpool & Wolverine," and remains on understandably good terms with Downey, Feige, and Cheadle. That wild schedule is a lot for anyone to handle, and once his time was up, Favreau decided to let someone else deal with "Iron Man 3."
Read more: Every Marvel Character Locked Up In The Raft
Jon Favreau Decided To Dip Out Of Marvel Movies After Iron Man 2's Frenzied Production
As "Iron Man 2" approached in 2010, the companies involved were more invested in the movie's release than a typical stand-alone movie, with Marvel Studios dreaming about a fully connected universe. Both "Thor" and "Captain America: The First Avenger" were on the docket for 2011, and that means "Iron Man 2" had a ton of worldbuilding to do ahead of a possible team-up in "The Avengers" in 2012. Jon Favreau and his team would be tasked with cramming details for all of those projects into his "Iron Man" sequel, and there wasn't really time for a bunch of delays or rewrites that would take multiple months.
According to Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards's book "MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios," which sheds some light on how this massive cultural behemoth took shape, Favreau admitted that the process was "exhausting." (We spoke with the authors here, in case you missed it!) The director said that getting "Iron Man 2" over the finish line took a ton of energy, and that made him wary of signing up for round 3 with the MCU, despite the relative success of both "Iron Man" movies up until that point, and he's pretty frank about he stresses of the second film in the book.
"A lot of things have to come together for this movie to work out. [...] We're up against it, schedule-wise," Favreau admitted. "We've given ourselves less time on this film than we did last time, and it's a much more ambitious project. This is part of the fear that I had when we started so late; less than two years to do this, to come up with this story. Set it up, prep it, film it, cut it, and do all the finishing touches," the director explained. "It's no excuse — we're going to have to do a great film — but it does put everybody under a tremendous amount of stress."
The MCU Continued Without Favreau
Over time, Favreau's decision to not making "Iron Man 3" looks smarter with each passing day. "Iron Man 2" made about $40 million more than the first film, but ended up costing around $60 million more to produce and caused giant headaches when it came to getting so many moving parts going in the right direction. A modern Marvel director like Taika Waititi or Destin Daniel Cretton might laugh at the concept of keeping all those plates spinning, because there are even more to account for in the current era of the MCU, and that's obviously stressful, too. But it feels like that's just the name of the game when it comes to big blockbuster filmmaking now -- not just Marvel, but with literally any massive property a studio tries to turn into a franchise.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's impossible not to look at "Iron Man 2" as a single project that ended up bearing a bunch of the brunt of that franchise criticism (much like Marc Webb's "Amazing Spider-Man 2") for setting things up more than servicing the plot of the movie we're actually watching. Financially, that approach technically worked out back in 2010, but things would continue to get more byzantine with every passing year for Marvel, to the point we're now in an era in which the company is trying its best to assure viewers that the kinds of connections that initially drew people to these movies aren't an obstacle to enjoying new entries. Jon Favreau was the canary in the coal mine for where this all would be headed, and all the studios seem to be learning what he discovered in real time 15 years ago: You can't put this much on creatives' plates and expect them to be able to make consistently great movies at breakneck speeds.
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