While Iron Man (played by Robert Downey Jr.) has become one of the most popular superheroes on screen, the character was a minor player in Marvel Comics’ back catalog when Kevin Feige and Jon Favreau were promoting his cinematic debut in 2008. Favreau’s Iron Man changed the landscape of cinema, ushering in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which resulted in the superhero boom that dominated the 2010s. While it’s hard to imagine audiences not being excited by seeing Iron Man on the big screen, many fans didn’t care before the film came out.

Feige recently sat down with Deadline to promote the upcoming MCU film, Deadpool & Wolverine, and amid the conversation about the future of the MCU, he took a moment to reflect on its cinematic beginnings, recalling when he presented the film at San Diego Comic-Con. Marvel Studios has dominated SDCC’s iconic Hall H for years now, but it was a different story in 2008. Feige recalled:

“When we were going to Comic-Con in 2007, when we were bringing Iron Man there with Jon Favreau, one media outlet did a story that read ‘Marvel Calls Out the ‘C’ Team.'”

Iron Man Release Date April 30, 2008 Runtime 126

At the time, the Marvel Studios president was facing an uphill battle from fans. Back then, Marvel Studios didn’t hold the rights to many of its major characters, with The X-Men belonging to Fox, and Spider-Man and his rogue’s gallery owned by Sony (which they still somewhat are). As a result, it was challenging to get audiences hyped about an Iron Man movie, believing him to be a second-rate character. Feige continued:

“People thought, ‘Well, are you going to be able to make anything of these characters that aren’t the major players if you don’t have Spider-Man or X-Men?’ People thought Marvel had nothing else. And we thought, ‘We have 8,567 other things.’ The audience wants to see a great piece of entertainment.”

Kevin Feige Thanks Blade & The X-Men for the MCU

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has done a lot with its so-called “C Team” characters, building Iron Man into a 30+ film, multi-billion dollar franchise. For newer audiences, it has become easy to forget the line of superhero and comic book movies that paved the way for the MCU.

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Kevin Feige attributes the MCU’s success to two major comic book movies: X-Men (2000) and Blade (1998). While the X-Men were popular characters among comic book fans, Blade was relatively obscure to the general public, which made the success and popularity of the Wesley Snipes-led movie even more surprising. Feige explained:

“I said for a long time that the one-two punch for Marvel, pre-dating me was Blade and then X-Men. Blade was a character that nobody knew from the comics, or very few people knew. It wasn’t advertised as being from Marvel Comics. X-Men was the No. 1 bestselling comic for the 15 years before the movie came out. Both of them did extremely well, and that instilled in us the notion that it is less about how many issues did you sell, or how famous was the animated show or the live-action series in the ’70s, but how engaging can you make the character, and how much of a new experience of a world can you bring to cinemas with that character.”

Iron Man
and the rest of the Marvel movies are available to stream on Disney+.