20 Fails That Nearly Killed The Marvel Film Universe

15. A Quentin Tarantino-Directed Iron Man Movie

After Tom Cruise and Nicolas Cage both decided against playing Iron Man, the idea was floated around that Quentin Tarantino might be a good fit to write and direct Tony Stark's inaugural cinematic outing. Why It Would've Ruined The MCU: Wait, what!? We're talking about the same guy whose most famous cinematic hallmarks include the line "dead n***er storage", a dude's ear being cut off, an alternate history in which Hitler is graphically shot to pieces, and so on and so forth? Yeah, that really screams a great fit for a family-friendly, PG-13 blockbuster flick. If for some God-forsaken reason Tarantino had decided to get into bed with Marvel, there are two ways this would have gone: a) Tarantino would have written an adult Iron Man movie that Marvel flat-out rejected, or b) Tarantino would have been forced to make a neutered PG-13 movie and probably hate the experience, or better yet, decline to take part. As a result we can't realistically entertain the idea that this was ever going to really happen, but either way, it would probably have resulted in a terrible movie. Tarantino is better off being left to his own devices and doing his own thing: he's a fiercely single-minded filmmaker, and one can't imagine he'd cope very well having to march to the beat of a gigantic creative enterprise like Marvel. Plus, given that this was the first MCU movie, if Tarantino had screwed it up, the MCU may have never even got going...