It has been almost 20 years for us in the superhero genre and so far we’ve said goodbye to 4 of our very favorite Superheroes who really changed the dynamic of cinema. It all began with Wolverine. Hugh Jackman had a huge impact on the Superhero genre. The Dark Knight had a shorter run comparatively, but it totally changed the game for Comic book movies. Then came Iron Man and Captain America who led the MCU to its glory. And now we’re done with all four of them.
These are the four heroes that we actually connected with. Black Widow and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man should be in this list, but Spidey didn’t get a good enough send off and Black Widow still has a movie left. So, we’re sticking with these 4. Batman left us somber but he came back at the end and we had hope. Captain America got to retire and live a happy life. We were happy for him. But the ones that actually made us cry were Wolverine & Iron Man.
The third act of Logan was extremely bloody and gory. That’s what actually made the end work even better than it would have in a PG 13 movie. We felt the pain of Logan dying after a brutal battle. We felt great loss and grown up men cried! That kind of a send-off was huge and it surely impacted Iron Man’s final few moments in a great way. Obviously, Tony Stark was a much larger figure and so he got what you may wanna call the best send-off for any character.
Matter of fact, Feige pitched Downey Tony Stark’s death in 2015 which was before Wolverine’s death was pitched, i.e. in 2016. But since the film came out in 2017 and Marvel got to see the way the audience reacted to the death of Wolverine, it influenced Stark’s final moment in a great way.
Kevin Feige recently spoke to Empire about this, and here’s what he had to say:
“No, the idea for Tony came up first and I think we were dedicated to it 100% and we never questioned it, because this was the whole idea. That was the whole point of the ending. Sometimes we’re influenced by the words of others, sometimes we’re not, and stay the course.
Around the time we started working on this film, there was some sense that deaths don’t matter in our movies – Nick Fury gets shot and died in Winter Soldier and comes back in the third act, which was awesome, but is not a death. And people were clamoring for, not death necessarily, but stakes and real emotion. And I remember thinking, ‘be careful what you wish for,’ as we started getting closer to this. But we never questioned it. All of the angst and all of the effort went into sticking the landing, to making it worthwhile.”
Feige continued:
“We saw Logan like the audience did, in a theater having nothing to do with the making of that film and went, ‘oh my god, what an amazing ending for Hugh as this character,’ and there are only a handful of examples where an actor so associated with a character can go out perfectly. That’s what we desperately wanted to give Robert, and that was what our focus was on.”
Remembering Logan’s final few moments and Tony’s final snap does make us emotional. DC could only wish that they could recreate the Dark Knight magic, or give their characters an ending like Logan, Captain America or Iron Man got. One may argue that Cap’s ending wasn’t as big. But you have to stop and ask yourself, that didn’t he deserve that? He gave his entire life to war. He already made the sacrifice play when he crashed the plane back in the 40s. He actually jumped on a Grenade way before he even had powers. He did deserve to be happy, and that’s what he got. Tony Stark already lived that life in the last 5 years, and then he made the biggest sacrifice of all.
