Earlier this month, Robert Downey Jr. expressed his willingness to return to Marvel despite the fact that his signature character, Tony Stark/Iron Man, perished in Avengers: Endgame. During a recent interview with Total Film, Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo shared their skeptical response to Downey’s desire to make a MCU comeback.
“I don’t know how they would do it,” said Anthony Russo. “I don’t know what the road to that would be [laughs].”
“I mean, we closed that book,” added Joe Russo. “So it would be up to them to figure out how to reopen it.”
Somehow, the Russos seem to have forgotten that their own movie led to the return of multiversal variants of Gamora and Loki despite both of those characters dying at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. And with Avengers: Secret Wars just a few years away, it shouldn’t be outside of the realm of possibility for a Tony Stark variant to appear, especially if Downey is game for an epic comeback.
If the MCU’s primary Tony Stark did manage to come back to life, he’d be far from the first superhero to pull off that feat. Regardless, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige recently told Vanity Fair about his reluctance to undo Stark’s heroic sacrifice.
“We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again,” said Feige. “We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way.”
