Jeff Bridges Says Marvel Hated Iron Man
It's easy to forget that Jeff Bridges was the original MCU villain, and he says that Marvel did not at all care for Iron Man.
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Marvel movies are basically box-office gold at this point. If you see a Marvel movie is going to be in theaters, there’s no question that it’s going to rake in a ton of money. Of course, it wasn’t always this way. And it might not be this way today if it wasn’t for Iron Man back in 2008. Marvel took a big risk, putting a ton of money toward a movie with a star who was just in the very early stages of his Hollywood comeback in the form of Robert Downey Jr. The gamble more than paid off, as the wild critical and commercial success of the movie kicked off the MCU as we know it. While RDJ and director Jon Favreau played a big role in making the movie great, it wouldn’t be quite the same without Jeff Bridges as the villainous Obadiah Stane. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Jeff Bridges talked about his experience working on the movie, and surprisingly, Marvel wasn’t so sure about the film at first. Check out the interview in the video below:
In the video, Jeff Bridges recalls how hectic the filming process was for Iron Man, saying the script went through tons of changes and rewrites. Bridges says, “It was so lucky to have Jon on there and Downey, because both of them are so, they’re terrific improvisers, and we spent a couple of weeks working on the script and rehearsing together, because we didn’t like the original script and we thought ‘Oh yeah, we fixed this, fixed that.’ And then came the first day of shooting, and Marvel kind of threw out our script that we had been working on, said, ‘No, that’s no good. It’s gotta be this and that.'” It’s definitely surprising that the movie that kicked off the MCU has so much uncertainty and chaos during its production. It seems like sometimes that’s just the way Hollywood magic works.
The MCU is anything but unstructured and chaotic at this point. Kevin Feige, the President of Marvel Studios, has things intricately planned out for the near future of the MCU and beyond. Nearly 14 years after the first Iron Man, the MCU is one of the best and only examples of long-term blockbuster storytelling. Now, team-up movies like Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame make billions of dollars and become the highest-grossing movies of all time. If you asked Jeff Bridges, Jon Favreau, and Robert Downey Jr. if they knew things would end up this way based on their first MCU experience, they likely wouldn’t have guessed that would be the result.
While Robert Downey Jr. and Jeff Bridges are done with their tenures in the MCU, the Marvel juggernaut chugs on without them. The rest of 2022 will feature numerous Marvel projects, including She-Hulk on Disney+ in August, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in theaters in November, and The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special at the end of the year. Meanwhile, you can see Jeff Bridges in his latest role in The Old Man on FX.
