Would you want to walk away from the role that has made you the world’s highest-paid actor two years in a row? That’s a conundrum Robert Downey Jr. has to face, but he’s not going to leave the role of Tony Stark/Iron Man any time soon.
While he tried to remain vague, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Downey sounded optimistic that he would be back for Iron Man 4.
“It’s down to Kevin [Feige, Marvel Studios president] and Ike [Perlmutter, CEO of Marvel Entertainment] and Disney to come to us with what the proposal is, and that’s on us to agree or disagree,” the actor said. “When things are going great, there’s a lot of agreement.”
There are some concerns that Downey Jr. may become too big for the penny-pinching Marvel. After all, Forbes said this week that Downey raked in $75 million, mostly just from his cut of the Iron Man 3 revenue.
But if Marvel will keep paying the bills, Downey isn’t going to walk away. “It’s that thing of: why give up the belt when it feels like you can barely get jabbed?” he told EW. “Most people are saying that right when they get knocked out.”
Marvel still hasn’t announced if or when Iron Man 4 would come out. It is possible that it is one of the mystery movies that Marvel scheduled last week. An Iron Man 4 would most likely come out after a third Avengers movie.
“He is Iron Man. He is Iron Man in the way that Sean Connery was James Bond,” Joss Whedon told the Daily Beast last year. At the time, there was some worry that Downey wouldn’t do Avengers: Age of Ultron, but that was put to rest quickly. Age of Ultron comes out on May 1, 2015.
image courtesy of Jennifer Graylock/INFphoto.com