The finale of the Infinity Saga, Avengers: Endgame was a fantastic sendoff for ten years of Marvel cinema. While the movie wasn’t as great as Infinity War, it was a satisfying ending that swelled tears aplenty with a heroic goodbye to Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man.
While fans were upset by the character’s death, most agree that it made for an amazing ending. However, original Iron Man director John Faverau really didn’t want this death to occur.
John Faverau didn’t want Iron Man to die
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo revealed that we’re told not to kill Iron Man. In conversations with original director John Faverau, the two were told they couldn’t kill off the character.
The two explained that the situation was already tense as they had yet to write Tony Starks final line. “It’s probably the most pressure we’ve ever had in… You do not want to fuck up Tony Stark’s last line,” they said.
However, even more pressure was added by Faverau. After discovering that Iron Man was set to be killed off, the director called up the Russo Brothers to warn against if.
“Jon Favreau, who called us up after he read the script... and said to us, 'are you really going to kill Iron Man?” Anthony Russo said. “I remember pacing on the corner of a stage on the phone with Favreau trying to talk him off a ledge. 'Cause he's like, 'You can't do this. It's gonna devastate people and you don't want them you know, walking out of the theater and into traffic.' We did it anyways."
Read More: Deadpool 3 will be on the scale of Infinity War, says MCU boss
A death that’s deserved
Despite Faverau‘s complaints, The Russo Brothers believed that the death of Iron Man was deserved. As a bookend to the saga he started, Iron Man‘s death was poetic in a way, the deserved to be able to do it.
“We felt like we had earned the arc that, you know, would feel redemptive and emotional and uplifting and hopeful, even though he had, he had sacrificed his life,” They said. “So he actually asked to improvise a few lines here. We tried some alternate versions of it... and they were sort of more in this snarky, Tony Stark vein. He wasn’t playing it with enough pain of the, you know, the power of the stone surging through his body.”
Iron Man may end up returning in the MCU at some point. With the multiverse now open, Iron Man could return at any point, probably for Secret Wars when that releases in 2025. In our opinion, we hope Downey Jr. doesn’t return; his departure was as perfect as any could’ve been.