7. Don Cheadle Replaces Terrence Howard - Iron Man 2
Marvel Studios
As with Ford and Jack Ryan, it's true that Don Cheadle had more time to develop the part of Rhodey Rhodes than his predecessor, but there's much more to his performance than Terrence Howard's.
While the circumstances surrounding Howard's departure are unfortunate, and his performance in the first Iron Man is certainly good, Cheadle has easily cemented himself as a key pillar of the Iron Man series - a status that was taken to a whole new level thanks to the buddy cop dynamic between him and Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark introduced in Shane Black's Iron Man 3.
War Machine may never be a leading character along the lines of the Avengers' foremost members, but with a key part set to follow in the upcoming Armor Wars, we can expect Cheadle to take his performance up a whole other level.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
