Iron Man
Iron Man is the definition of how to start a franchise, or in this case, a universe. Nowadays, we see movies such as Superman (2025) opening franchises with lots of characters, and no origin story, and although this works sometimes, at Movie Munchy, we believe every franchise should start just like Iron Man did with the MCU.
Iron Man follows Tony Stark (played by Robert Downey Jr.), a rich man built on his multimillion-dollar empire, Stark Industries. This business is built on their weapons trade, but when Tony tries to show off his new bombs, he gets captured by the Ten Rings organisation and put into a cave. But in this cave, he builds his first Iron Man suit and escapes.
When he returns, he decides to end all weapons trade through Stark Industries and starts building a more advanced Iron Man suit. While this is happening, Tony’s mentor, Obediah Stane, is furious and believes the company will collapse without their main source of income, and hence decides that the best course of action is to kill Tony and take the business for himself. He then creates a suit for himself, The Iron Monger, and is defeated by Tony, with the movie ending with Tony revealing to the world that he is Iron Man.
As we can see from that short plot summary, the movie grapples with themes including the morality of the weapons trade and corporate greed. It also has almost all of the characters as flawed, including Tony, who makes decisions on a whim and is often rude and snarky to his friend Rhodey and his assistant Pepper. This is elevated by all of the actors, with them all pulling off their characters perfectly, especially Robert Downey Jr.
Because of these themes and the acting, the movie is thoroughly entertaining and goes into an area not seen before in superhero movies. Hence why we decided to give Iron Man an 81%.
