Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man in more than one way. Sure, he's arguably the big screen's top genius billionaire playboy philanthropist in an armored suit (we'll see later this month how the Batfleck stacks up to Downey's Tony Stark) but the A-lister is also celebrating his seventh appearance in a Marvel movie with the upcoming Captain America: Civil War (in theaters May 6) and he's expected to also be in the two-part all-superheroic-hands-on-deck situation of Avengers: Infinity War.

Hopefully Tony and Cap won't still be fighting by then. You know, because Thanos is coming.

When we visited the Atlanta set of Civil War, the subject of a fourth solo Iron Man film came up and while Downey thinks it'd be great, "I don’t think that’s in the cards," he admits:

"In a way it’s Cap 3 but for me it’s like my little Iron Man 4 and then it's back to the thing we all recognize. Everything pulls over to the side of the road when the thunder of an Avengers thing comes through because that’s how it is until it changes. If it changes."

Downey also doesn't know if he'd ever direct a Marvel film — "Look, that might be the only gig they offer me in five years!" — but he had high praise for what James Gunn is doing in space with his Guardians of the Galaxy films:

"Gunn spun everything in a whole other different way where it’s like, wow, without even trying to, that took a little bit of the real estate out of some tonal stuff we were doing so we don’t want to fight that. We want to give way to that. We want to yield to that kind of powerful dynamic that they created and just go, ‘Hey, that’s great. You know what, we’re going to widen the track here and we’re going to stay in this lane, and then we’ll see when it’s time to switch lanes again.' "

And while he and Chris Evans' Cap are at odds in Civil War, Downey promises fans that Tony Stark isn't going the route of total villain as he did in the event comic series of the same name: