Financial Reason Tom Cruise Didn’t Play Iron Man In MCU, Revealed | CPT PPP Coverage

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Lost in the shuffle of new explosive memoirs coming out this month — including autobiographical releases from Britney Spears and John Stamos — is a new definitive account of the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has some pretty big bombshells of its own. Among the juicier nuggets in MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios is the revelation that Tom Cruise was originally targeted to play Iron Man, but ultimately was unable to commit for financial reasons.

“Cruise’s asking fee at the time was more than even a profitable studio like Fox was willing to risk on an untested superhero property,” the book explains. It’s hard to imagine Marvel as being a tight-budgeted new studio, or as a superhero property being considered “untested,” but this was ten years before Iron Man was greenlit to the big screen, back when the rights to the Iron Man comic book were owned by 20th Century Fox.

Written by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards, the book details what led Marvel to test the waters with slightly less A-list stars attached to the role of Tony Stark. Even before Robert Downey Jr. met with director Jon Favreau for the pivotal breakout role, other names were bandied about like The Passion of the Christ star Jim Caviezel, Deadwood’s Timothy Olyphant, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind’s Sam Rockwell.

Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t even considered very seriously at first due to his “almost perfect record of commercial failure and a well-publicized reputation as a substance abuser.” However, Favreau thought Downey’s troubled past made him the perfect embodiment for the character and the rest is history.

It’s hard to imagine the role of Tony Stark being played by anyone other than Robert Downey Jr., but apparently if it hadn’t been an impossible financial mission to attach Tom Cruise, we might associate someone else entirely with the career-defining role.