We first visited Avengers Tower in 2012's The Avengers, with the skyscraper returning in Avengers: Age of Ultron three years later. However, by the time Spider-Man: Homecoming swung into theaters in 2016, Tony Stark had decided to sell the building.
It being emptied by Happy Hogan was a major plot point in the reboot, with The Vulture attempting to steal Iron Man's many dangerous weapons during Homecoming's final act. Spider-Man ultimately thwarted his sinister plan.
Avengers Tower has since been teased in the MCU, though Marvel Studios has stopped short of revealing who purchased the building. While the Fantastic Four and Mephisto have been named as likely possibilities, Thunderbolts* confirmed that Valentina Allegra de Fontaine and O.X.E. were the ones who bought the building from Iron Man.
That was for the "good optics," and so the company would have somewhere to base its Sentry program.
So, how much did Val pay for Avengers Tower? IGN caught up with several experts, including Michael T. Cohen, a Principal with Williams Equities, which owns and invests in several million square feet of NYC real estate. He has four decades of experience and is a big Marvel Comics fan, and believes Avengers Tower would have demanded an asking price of $1.1 billion.
"The metric by which we would measure the value would be price per square foot," Cohen explained. "So my guess is, there's nowhere where they safely tell you whether it's a million square feet, or a million and a half, or how large it really is."
"So we're kind of shooting in the dark here, without any of the underlying math, but I would say one could easily assume that the Avengers Tower would sell for a billion dollars or more based upon the look of it, the size, and the location," he added.
However, Cohen doesn't expect such a sale to have been an easy process, perhaps explaining why The Avengers' former base stood empty for so many years.
"It would be very challenging to buy property insurance for Avengers Tower if you were a conventional investor. The Avengers, presumably, don't occupy the entire building," Cohen pondered. "While it's a fabulous location and it's terribly prestigious, how would you feel about being a tenant in Avengers Tower, say, on the floor beneath them, or above them, or anywhere in the same elevator bank?"
"Do the Avengers have a private entrance, or do they ride with the conventional tenants?" he continued. "If you really built Avengers Tower in the middle of the city, there are some very interesting, idiosyncratic considerations one would have to take into account."
Val renamed Avengers Tower the "Watchtower" and started adding to the skyscraper in a way that paid homage to The Sentry's Watchtower that sat above the team's base in the comics. How much the building will evolve after that memorable post-credits scene remains to be seen.
Thunderbolts* is now playing in theaters.