Several projects featuring Tony Stark were thrown around various production studios before Robert Downey Jr. bringing Tony Stark to life, but audiences almost got a few very different variations on the character.
Between the 1970s and 1990s, Marvel Entertainment Group sold off the film rights to many Marvel Comics characters, including high profile characters such as The Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Hulk, and Iron Man himself. This agreement allowed 20th Century Fox to develop a franchise featuring the mutant Spider-Man launching and rebooting films to varying degrees of success. It wasn't until 2004 when Marvel Studios began their plan to self-finance their own movies, thus birthing the Marvel Cinematic Universe that would revolutionize the landscape of superhero cinema.
While other production studios created several Avengers: Endgame, and while his legacy will be felt in the MCU for years to come, it's interesting to look back and think of what could've been.
Universal Pictures' Iron Man
The 90s were a difficult time for Marvel movies, consisting mostly of straight-to-television projects such as 1990's Captain America, which bombed in monumental fashion, and an unreleased attempt at bringing the Fantastic Four to life in 1994. In light of the poor reception to Marvel projects, after Universal Pictures acquired the film rights to Iron Man in April 1990, they gave From Beyond and Dolls, it's likely that this version of Iron Man would've been darker and more experimental than what Marvel Studios would later produce.
Allegedly, Neumeier's script focused on an older, reclusive Tony Stark who has given up the superhero life and settled down in a Las Vegas penthouse. The first act would've featured a global catastrophic event that would cause Stark to dig out the old armor and suit up once again after 20 years of retirement. Not much else is known about this project, but it's possible to imagine Gordon's frequent collaborator Jeffrey Combs playing the egotistical Stark, perhaps up against a more supernatural villain which would've played perfectly to Gordon and Neumeier's strengths. Ultimately, though, the project never even got out of pre-production, likely because of Universal's reluctance to produce yet another potential Marvel flop.
20th Century Fox's The Iron Man
Six years later, Universal had all but given up on an Iron Man project, selling the film rights to 20th Century Fox in April 1996. Jeff Vintar and Iron Man co-creator Stan Lee set to work pretty much straight away on putting together a story for Fox, with Vintar transferring this story into a screenplay that would feature a new science-fiction origin for Tony Stark. Tentatively titled "The Iron Man", the film was being produced by Fox alongside Mission Impossible fame who was Marvel's favorite to play Stark, with his then-wife Nicole Kidman being billed to play opposite him as Pepper Potts.
The film would've focused on a Cold War-era Stark manufacturing weapons as well as the "Rescue Redeemer Armor", a suit designed to provide medical assistance to those injured in the field but would be refitted for military purposes. The early script also featured the GoldenEye writer Jeffrey Caine in 1999. A last-ditch effort to get production rolling came when Fox approached Quentin Tarantino to direct, but this, unfortunately, led nowhere. With too many superhero projects already on 20th Century Fox's plate, the potential of seeing Iron Man in film in the 1990s died when the rights were sold to New Line Cinema in December 1999.
New Line Cinema's Iron Man
By July 2000, a completely new script was being penned for New Line Cinema by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who'd previously written collaboratively on films such as Aladdin and Iron Man's post-credits scene.
Even though McCanlies had turned in a completed script by 2002 and the studio had approached Joss Whedon to direct (who'd later go on to write and direct The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron), the project still found itself in development hell. By 2004, Tony Stark against his own father, Howard Stark, who would've taken up the moniker of War Machine, a mantle gifted to Don Cheadle's James "Rhodey" Rhodes in the MCU. New Line seemed to drag their feet in production of their Iron Man project, and since the directing deal with Cassavetes eventually fell through, there was nowhere left for them to go.
After New Line Cinema returned the film rights to Marvel Studios in 2005, Iron Man was announced as the first project of what would become the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starting completely from scratch and discarding every previous script. Almost two decades later, Iron Man has become a household name and has brought in billions of dollars for Marvel Studios and the Walt Disney Company, as well as blasting Robert Downey Jr. into super-stardom after substance abuse and legal troubles during the 1990s and early 2000s. In Marvel Studios' hands, Tony Stark carried over perfectly from the comics page to the big screen, making it hard to imagine any other version of Iron Man.
