Ranking Every Billion Dollar Movie - From Worst To Best

17. Iron Man 3

Box Office: $1,214,811,252

After the comparatively disastrous Iron Man 2 careened its way towards the very bottom of the ladder of MCY movie quality, Iron Man 3 had a lot of work to do to right the ship for Tony Stark. Luckily, it had the strong foundation of Robert Downey Jr's performance as Tony Stark to rely upon and hiring Shane Black to direct was a masterstroke.

Black reimagined the film as a nostalgic action flick, with a buddy cop relationship between Tony and Rhodey front and centre built in Drew Pearce's excellent script, and the result is a charming, intelligent affair dealing with the fall-out of The Avengers and expanding on key issues for Tony.

There's still a lot of soreness about the Mandarin twist, but it's dumb to reduce the entire film to that one complaint - which was misplaced anyway, given how racially charged the original Mandarin was in the comics - and it's one of those films that actually improves the more you see it.