With Ghost Rider, Spider-man, X-Men, and Wolverine all getting reworked again for studios other than Marvel, there has been a lot of discussion about script quality and staying true to source material.
Most, myself included, call for Marvel to hopefully get all their film rights back. This is happening little by little as this year the Punisher was once again brought under the Marvel umbrella.
But if we take a look back to one of the original Iron Man scripts, before Marvel got the rights back, we might just have to realize how lucky we are. This script called for the movies main villain to be Tony Stark's father, Howard. Howard stole Tony's tech and used it to become War Machine.
There are more details in the linked article, including what Tom Cruise evidently thought of the father v. son plotline.
"Tom Cruise has been forever attached to this thing and he wanted to do a marvel character movie different than from what has come before. I guess he read this, saw THE HULK, jumped on Toby Emmerich's couch and was like, 'Oh...No! They did that whole father vs. son thing in The Hulk!'"
That was awhile ago, thank goodness Marvel got the rights back and started from scratch!
http://web.archive.org/web/20080205070555/http://latinoreview.com/scriptreview.php?id=22