Article content continued

When you think back to that time four or five years ago, did you already have an idea of what that endpoint would be and did it all match up to how you envisioned it?

Yeah. Part of the advantages of being able to work in a way where we can chart out multiple films over multiple years is we can start aiming there. We can start evolving storylines to get to where we want to go. You see Guardians or Black Panther or most recently Captain Marvel; those work as if they weren’t connected to anything else. But when you watch them together they are very clearly connected.

How did the stars react to the idea of building towards a true ending for this phase of the MCU?

We were excited internally at Marvel Studios. As ambitious as all of our films are, nothing had been as ambitious as Infinity War and Endgame. So that had really galvanized the team. And when we started talking to the actors about it they were all excited by the notion of finality. … We were all daunted by the task at hand, but excited by it.

I asked you last year, why was Robert Downey Jr. the right actor to kickstart the MCU, but really I should have asked, why Iron Man? Iron Man is a character people knew, but I’m not sure he was beloved back then in the way that he is now.

The reason we were excited to make that our first Marvel Studios movie is he was quite different from other heroes. He didn’t get his powers in an accident. He didn’t get his powers from some twist of fate. He built them. His ingenuity is what made him special. He was also an industrialist who went through this story of redemption and that to us is very unique compared to what had been seen up to that point in comic book films. I remember telling to the studio marketing team that sold that movie that if we all do our job right, Tony Stark will be as big a household name as Iron Man. He’s as big a character as Iron Man and that’s where Downey came in. Tony out of the costume should be as interesting as when he’s flying around in the costume and it really was (director Jon) Favreau and Downey that took that and made it what it was. Iron Man 1 in particular was a breath of fresh air.