The death of Tony Stark at the end of Avengers: Endgame decisively brought down the curtain on the first decade of the MCU. Robert Downey Jr.’s performance kickstarted the whole affair, and if Iron Man hadn’t been a critical darling and box office smash, the whole project might never have gotten off the ground. But, after ten years of storytelling, Stark’s tale came to an end with him heroically sacrificing himself to defeat Thanos’ army and save the universe. Not bad considering he started out in 2008 as a self-centred scumbag, eh?
Since then, there’ve been rumors that he might one day return from the grave. My bet though is that, for all intents and purposes, RDJ is done with the role for the foreseeable future. However, the actor still seems happy to use his superhero popularity for a good cause, as he’s currently fundraising for animal welfare charities connected with the Australian wildfires and is selling his autographed handprint off.
He’s posted a picture of this on Instagram, too, captioning it:
“Pulling the old #repulsors out of #retirement for a #good cause…”
Granted, this is a pretty tenuous Iron Man connection, especially as he isn’t wearing any of the costume to do the pose in (most of it’s been purely CGI for years), but he’s sort of doing the pose. That’s got to count for something, right?
Then again, after the complete disaster that was Dolittle, Downey Jr. is probably eager for audiences to think of him as Tony Stark rather than an eccentric guy with a terrible Welsh accent who pulls things out of animal butts. Here’s hoping he can recapture that old magic when he returns for another runaround in Victorian London in Sherlock Holmes 3 in 2021.