MARVEL Studios president Kevin Feige has quashed rumours that the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) will bring back the original Avengers and their respective actors.
“We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again,” Feige said in relation to Robert Downey Jr’s role as Tony Stark in the emotional climax of Avengers: Endgame.
“We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way,” he said in an interview with Vanity Fair. He added while it was hard to imagine the MCU without Downey, at one point in time, the studio was hesitant about casting the actor.
“It purely came down to the Marvel board being nervous about putting all of their chips in their future films on somebody who famously had those legal troubles in the past,” Feige said of Downey’s arrests.
Following his Iron Man casting, the Oppenheimer actor went on to be a team player with his fellow superheroes and fought for them at various points. Ahead of the first Avengers, he even used his contract negotiations to get higher pay for his co-stars.
“We used to joke and say that Robert was the head of the acting department because everybody there looked up to him,” Feige said. “He took them all under his wing, but not in a subservient sense. He just became their cheerleader.”