10 Things That Will Never Happen In The Marvel Cinematic Universe‏

7. Tony Stark Replaced By A Teen

As we've detailed before, The Crossing is not only one of the worst Iron Man stories Marvel ever produced - it may just be one of the worst comics ever, period. It retconned years of Tony Stark's history so that he was under the control of a supervillain the whole time, invalidating decades of readers' favourite stories. It saw the brainwashed Stark murdering some Avengers second-stringers. And it ended with the evil Stark being defeated with the help of his teenaged self, whom his superhero comrades had plucked out of the time stream to remind their friend of the innocence he had lost. Well, actually it ended with Evil Stark sacrificing himself to save the Young Stark - and the rest of the Marvel Universe - from Kang, the bad guy who had been pulling his strings all these years. Which meant that Iron Man as we knew him was dead, and it was up to his teenage self to take his place. Even ignoring the time paradoxes that move put in place, it was also a uniformly terrible idea, designed to attract younger readers at the expense of everyone else/good stories/good sense. The recent All-New X-Men series played with similar time-swapping teen antics, but that's pretty good (and might be a cool way of bridging the different timelines in the X-movies), and Teen Tony was...not. There are rumours that Robert Downey Jr may be close to playing Stark for the last time, which leaves Marvel Studios in the unenviable position of retiring one of their hottest properties, or else recasting a character who had already found his perfect actor in Downey. Making the movie Iron Man a teenaged Tony Stark is the worst possible path they could follow, and we're reasonably confident that they won't. Touch wood.