The MCU has gone on nearly a decade with hit after hit with fans, beginning with the very iconic Iron Man in 2008 to jump start it all. Things have gone a very long way for our characters – but could a familiar face we haven’t seen since the beginning be popping in again soon?
There has been talk of antagonist Obadiah Stane, aka The Iron Monger, returning with rumors hitting all over. While a somewhat forgettable Marvel villain, who wouldn’t want to see more of our beloved Jeff Bridges?
The actor himself even gave his thoughts a few weeks back:
“No, in the script, the script that I hired onto, my character lives! They open my suit up and I’m gone. But then when we got to shoot that scene, they didn’t open my suit up! I said, “Aren’t you going to open my suit up?” They said, “No.” I said, “You’re going to kill my guy?” And they say, “Well, it’s a comic book. You could come back. Who knows?” You know? But anyway.”
With the comment going full circle, fast forward to now when Uproxx spoke to Kevin Feige about the possibility of said character coming back:
“Well, that would be awesome to have him come back. That would be great.”
He elaborated on production being a lot different with what was in mind for Stane at the time:
“As you may recall, when he was hired, he was a secondary villain to the Mandarin. And as we were prepping the movie we realized we didn’t want to do the Mandarin in that movie. And when we took him out and made Obadiah the lead villain, Iron Man became what Iron Man became. But what was required is that Iron Monger [Obadiah Stane] had to go down into that arc reactor.”
At the end of it all, it comes down to how they’ll handle writing around surviving into a reactor and explosions galore or even if resurrection will be possible. After all, with the potential character deaths in Avengers 4 being a much bigger deal to showcase the realistic loss on the whole MCU timeline.
But hey, there could be other opportunities for Bridges himself to come back to the comic book world – possibly in the DC Cinematic Universe. Either way, The Dude abides.
Marvel’s latest film, Thor: Ragnarok, opens November 3rd.