“Yeah, that was totally made up. I mean, there’s no cut footage of Tom Cruise!” Waldron said. He added, “But I love Tom Cruise, and I said to [Marvel Studios president] Kevin [Feige] at one point, I was like, Could we get Tom Cruise’s Iron Man? I remember reading about that in Ain’t It Cool News back in the day, that Tom Cruise was going to be Iron Man.” As for whether anyone reached out to Cruise, Waldron said, “I don’t believe so. I just don’t think it was ever an option, because of availability.” Years before Robert Downey Jr. suited up as the Marvel superhero in 2008’s Iron Man, which kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Cruise spoke with IGNFF about being approached to play Tony Stark. “They came to me at a certain point and, when I do something, I wanna do it right. If I commit to something, it has to be done in a way that I know it’s gonna be something special,” Cruise said in 2005. “And as it was lining up, it just didn’t feel to me like it was gonna work. I need to be able to make decisions and make the film as great as it can be, and it just didn’t go down that road that way.” The Top Gun: Maverick actor continued, “It was two years before we decided to make [War of the Worlds]. There’s a commitment. Obviously, I trust Steven… I’ve never just made a movie to make a movie. I’ve always made it because I was really interested in the story. I wanted to make that kind of picture and see what it would take. And it was an adventure for me. And for [Iron Man], it just wasn’t panning out, so far. As of yet…” Later in 2018, Cruise admitted to ComicBook.com that he was “not close” to landing the role. He said, “Not close, and I love Robert Downey Jr. I can’t imagine anyone else in that role, and I think it’s perfect for him.” Although Cruise did not appear as the Superior Iron Man in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, there were plenty of cameos. Discussing the movie’s Illuminati, Waldron told Rolling Stone: “The final lineup in that group is beyond my wildest dreams of who we could get—and then dispatch. I never dreamed we’d be able to do that. But the lineup is close to, I think, who was originally in my first draft, which was: ‘Okay, I know it can’t actually be this.’ And then it ended up being close to that. It was just a moving target of who’s available and who’s right. It became, ‘Alright, if you’re putting together an Illuminati, who would actually need to be in it?’ You’d have people with certain power sets. And we tried to be true to what kind of characters were represented in the Illuminati in the comics.”
Who is Superior Iron Man?
According to ComicBook.com, “Superior Iron Man spins out of Marvel’s Axis event series, in which a magic spell goes wrong and inverts the moral polarity of some of Marvel’s heroes and villains. Tony Stark gets caught in the blast, unleashing a version of him that is all of his darkest traits and none of his virtuous ones.”
How did the rumors of Tom Cruise playing Iron Man in Doctor Strange 2 start?
Waldron confirmed to Rolling Stone that the rumors were totally made up by fans. He said, “As it was being talked about online, I was like, Yeah, that’d be cool!” Next, we’ve assembled 50 Marvel trivia questions to challenge even the most devoted MCU fans!
