Iron Man is lame. That's right. Dude's been around in comic book form for over forty years, and give or take thirty seconds of those forty plus years he's been lame, lame, lame, lame, lame.

Think about it: Iron Man is a comic about a business man. He's not even a slacker playboy like Bruce Wayne. Tony Stark really like math and he's got greasy hair and a moustache, and for a while in the 80s and 90s, he even sported a mullet.

And did I mention, he's a buiness man?

The only reason he's managed to hold onto his own title for all these years is inertia. There are certain books that Marvel just won't cancel, because starting up new books is even harder than keeping the old, incredibly lame ones going.

When is Iron Man even remotely cool? When he's a member of the Avengers. And then, he's only not-lame because he's standing next to Ant Man.

I may be overstating things. Really, I just want to get across this essential idea to the uninformed:

Iron Man equals dumbness.

And here, I'll get protests that the Iron Man movie was great, and it was the best action movie so far this year, and it was one of the best superhero movies in a long time, and blah blah blah blah blah.

Okay. Granted. And take heart from the fact that Marvel Stuidos has heard you and listened to you and greenlit Iron Man II in 2010 and Thor in 2010 and Captain America in 2011 and The Avengers in 2011 and, oh yeah, frickin' Ant Man in there somewhere as well.

Marvel Studios has released exactly one film, and they're already rolling out a slate of movies that will all be in production at roughly the same time, all of which are dependent for their success on the rather dubious propositions that (a) Marvel Studios knows what it's doing and (b) Iron Man was a good idea for a movie.

To step back for a moment, let us consider this:

Johnny Depp (yes, Johnny Depp -- bare with me) rose to fame as a teen heartthrob on Fox TV's 21 Jump Street. Personally, all I can remember of Depp's performance on that show is the one time that he wouldn't share a little carton of milk with a kid who had AIDS.

"What's wrong with you, Johnny Depp? Why won't you drink my AIDS milk???"

(For the record, yes, even in the 80s I understood that you couldn't get AIDS from sharing milk. Also, in the 80s, I was aware that sharing milk with anybody was profoundly, profoundly weird. But back to the digression.)

After Jump Street, Depp's career took an interesting left turn into Tim Burton-land. Which is to say that he did a lot of weird, arty movies that very few people saw, but that earned him lots of geek cred and critical respect.

Then along came Pirates of the Caribbean, the perfect vehicle for Depp to be center-stage weird in a way that moms and dads and little daughter Suzies could appreciate from coast to coast and presumably in the Carribbean.

 

 

Depp went from cooky indie star to mega-watt MTV Movie Award devouring behemoth. Or something like that.

Now, to the point: Iron Man is Robert Downey Jr.'s Pirates of the Caribbean. And though the film has plenty going for it, what it mostly has is Robert Downey Jr. Downey has, as they say, arrived.

He's come from cheesey 80s movies to an Oscar nomination for Chaplin to drugs to Ally McBeal to this moment, when he threatens to upstage comedy heavyweight Ben Stiller and comedy heavyweight Jack Black in the upcoming Tropical Thunder.

Iron Man is awesome because Robert Downey Jr. is awesome. Iron Man himself is, as we've previously established, lame.

So, sure, everyone is going to flock to see Iron Man II just so they can see more of Robert Downey Jr. play that character they like. (That character being Robert Downey Jr.) And the box office will be huge on the first day, maybe even record breaking, because everyone always builds these movies up in expectation. And maybe, if we're lucky, the second movie will even live up to all these expectations and all this hype and all will be right with the world.

But then comes Thor, which if you're not familiar with the comics, is about Fabio wandering around Middle Earth, talking like a Shakespeare reject and hitting Yubflugs with his hammer. Basically.

And, as far as I know, Robert Downey Jr. will not be playing Thor.

And if that doesn't smash your enthusiasm flat, we've got two movies coming up the year after that. One is a World War II action movie about a guy who dresses up in a red, white, and blue costume and beats up Hitler. The other teams Robert Downey Jr. with Fabio and the guy in the red, white, and blue costume to beat up Ed Norton.

Or something like that.

My point is this. The folks at Marvel Studios might be geniuses. Maybe every Marvel movie that comes out is going to be better than the last. But the reality is that for every Batman, you have a Batman and Robin and a Catwoman. For every Superman, you have a Superman III and a Supergirl. For every Spider-Man, there's a Daredevil, Elektra, Ghost Rider, Man-Thing, and/or Howard the Duck.

 

 

Marvel's counting on the fact that they can recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle that is Robert Downey Jr. over and over and over again.

Well, the new Hulk will be the test. The buzz is really mixed on that one, and it's still an open question whether the Hulk is a fundamentally interesting enough character to win over mass audiences.

I mean, a kid might want to grow up to be Superman or Spider-Man or even Wolverine, but the Hulk doesn't fill that same emotional space.

If the new Hulk tanks, it'll be the first crack in the Marvel armor. Next year, there's a Wolverine coming out from Fox. Marvel doesn't have much say in that, but if it's not much better than X3, Marvel's gonna take the heat.

And if Iron Man and Fabio: Ye Olde Yubflug Hammerer don't live up to expectations, it's going to be a long, quiet year leading up to Captain America in 2011.

I wish everyone the best. I hope I'm pleasantly surprised, as this is always preferable to being unpleasantly unsurprised.

There's a Marvel comic called What If...? that imagines crazy takes on established storylines. Like "What If... Spider-Man Joined the X-Men?" or "What If... Iron Man Joined the X-Men?"

Mostly, they're about the X-Men.

I'm looking forward to the What If...? storyline, "What If... Marvel Studios didn't choke big time?"

Now, that would be incredible.