When Iron Man was released in 2008, post-credits scenes weren't exactly the norm. However, for anyone patient enough to wait until the very end of that movie (which was released 15 years ago today), they were rewarded with Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury telling Tony Stark about the "Avengers Initiative."
Ultimate Spider-Man creator and prolific comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis was tasked with penning the scene and recently reflected on the experience with Inverse.
"My memory is: Write everything you can think of," he recalls. "As delightful as that sounds, I stayed up all night. This was like a writer’s puzzle. I wrote a couple pages down. I wrote every serious thing you can think of and every dumb thing you can think of."
"I got a call from Kevin, who said, 'Samuel L. Jackson is showing up tomorrow to do a favor. He’s just showing up and we’re gonna wing it.' It wasn’t normal, where you have an assignment and them going, 'We need Nick Fury to get him to the Avengers,'" Bendis continues. "That is not what they said. They said, 'Nick Fury is showing up. What should he say?'"
The writer put together lots of different ideas that were shot, including references to Spider-Man and the X-Men and a joke about Jackson's role in Snakes on a Plane.
"When I saw they went with Avengers - the promise of more - it was obviously the right choice," he says. "It’s a big fingers-crossed [moment] because nothing was set. A lot of good things have to happen for an Avengers movie to happen. As soon as the movie opened, it was obvious the goal was in reach."
In the same interview, Bendis looked back on his role in Marvel's controversial Creative Committee. Founded by Marvel Entertainment, the group's role was to share ideas and feedback with Marvel Studios. Kevin Feige convinced Disney CEO Bob Iger to make the studio a separate entity.
For Bendis, however, he has only fond memories of that time.
"During production of Iron Man, Kevin and the gang put together a group of people that were in the Marvel office and knew a damn thing about Iron Man," he reveals. "Marvel had leveraged their library for a bank loan to make Iron Man. If it worked, great. If it didn’t, the bank owned Marvel. So it was all hands on deck."
"That was the beginning of the Marvel Creative Committee that held together for the first three phases of the MCU, which they made official after Iron Man. But at the time, it was anybody who knew anything. ‘Look at this; what do you think?’ I’m a film nerd and I have all these philosophies of my heroes in my head. Just trying to apply them to what was in front of us was exciting."
As far as we're aware, Marvel Studios isn't doing anything to celebrate Iron Man's 15th anniversary. Ironheart was going to be released on Disney+ in 2023 at one stage but is now expected to premiere in 2024.