The Single Biggest Mistake Each MCU Film Has Made
11. Iron Man: The Third Act
The Movie:
Iron Man was a huge gamble for the studio, but it firmly established the franchise's delightful skill of defying all expectations and delivering gripping entertainment. It's been eclipsed by many of its successors but Iron Man remains a very good start for the franchise.
A thing that's easy to forget is that Iron Man isn't massively action-packed. It feels more like a character study about a rich, charismatic but emotionally tortured man who happens to be a superhero. Watching Tony Stark grow as a person throughout the film is really touching, but unfortunately the film loses it by the end.
Iron Man works because of Tony's character arc. The focus needed to stay on him doing his superhero work, but instead the focus abruptly switches to Obadiah Stane (a completely wasted Jeff Bridges) who, in a painfully obvious twist, turns out to be a super-villain with a boring evil plan.
Stane and the fight to defeat him are not only painfully uninteresting, but these elements feel like bland superhero formula which undoes all the subversive, character-based work of the rest of the movie.
It doesn't derail the film and the final scene is great, but it's disappointing that the film chose to remove the focus on character in favor of a predictable, boring and formulaic finale.
Fix:
Just have Tony Stark fighting some more battles against the Ten Rings without a big super-villain battle, while saving Obadiah Stane for the sequel.