Alternate Versions Of Every MCU Movie We Almost Got To See

19. Tom Cruise's Iron Man

All the way back to the late 1990s when Fox held the rights to Iron Man, Tom Cruise was in heavy consideration to play Tony Stark, even intending to produce the picture.

Ultimately, production stalled long enough that Cruise moved onto other projects, and after years of Iron Man being passed around Hollywood, it finally ended up at Paramount, where the Robert Downey Jr.-starring version released in 2008. The rest, of course, is history.

Would It Have Worked?: As difficult as it is to imagine anyone but Downey Jr. playing Tony Stark, Cruise is such a charismatic force of nature that he certainly would've been a fine shepherd to oversee the MCU.

There would definitely be questions about Cruise's commercial viability back in 2008 - especially as his personal "scandals" were rather fresh in the mind - and his Tony Stark would've inevitably been quite different to the one we eventually got, but it's hard to imagine his interpretation failing.