10 Biggest Casting Mistakes In MCU History

When Iron Man 2 was announced as the natural follow up to the MCU's original hero, Iron Man, all heads turned to see who would be brought in to go head to head with Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark.

Mickey Rourke, fresh off an Academy Award nominated performance in The Wrestler, had never seen his stock raised so high and Marvel wanted to capitalise on that talent and buzz surrounding the man.

While creating and shooting his character's performance as Ivan Vanko, Rourke spoke to Kevin Feige about making the character more three dimensional and kept all talk of stereotypical Russian villain at a minimum.

The team allowed him to explore Vanko as a real human being but would then decide to cut the performance and, according to Rourke, 'most of the performance ended up on the floor'.

Rourke went on to blast Marvel in that same interview a couple of years later, telling them that if 'they want to make mindless comic book movies, then (he) doesn't want to be a part of that'.

Marvel came across as a team who would go behind an actor's back in order to assure they get the performance they wanted and it can't have encouraged any other Oscar-calibre performers to come aboard.

That's what you get when you cast a straight shooter like Rourke and if they didn't know that going into the flick, you can only class this as a bad casting move.