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My wife and I joined some friends for an Iron Man double-date on Saturday night. Our verdict: A fun, well-done flick all the way around.*

And, oh, by the way, a blockbuster in the making for Marvel:

‘Iron Man’ Forges Historic Box Office Win

The 2008 summer movie season started off on a historic note as Iron Man opened with huge box office numbers that propelled it to a weekend win and landed it in the company of the most impressive movie premieres of all time. The Marvel comic adaptation grossed $101 million from Friday to Sunday, according to early estimates. When Thursday evening’s screenings are added in, the film’s full weekend total comes to $104 mil. . . . [W]hen you consider just superhero flicks, this movie scored the fourth top opening in history, following those of Spider-Man 3 ($151.1 mil), Spider-Man ($114.8 mil), and X-Men: The Last Stand ($102.8 mil) — all of which are Marvel properties, though Iron Man is the first film to be fully financed by the comic studio. [...]

To call this the biggest opener ever for star Robert Downey Jr. is an understatement: The actor has never even fronted a movie that grossed $100 mil during its entire run, let alone in one weekend.

Here are two lines of thought about Iron Man that extend beyond the film itself:

1. Which stars have redeemed themselves more thoroughly than Robert Downey Jr.?

I’m the last person to follow celebrity gossip, but even I couldn’t fail to be drawn in by the horror of Downey’s collapse into addiction. The pretty-boy druggie of Less Than Zero became what he had portrayed, and I feared that he would be a broken man after his stint in prison.

But now, Downey is a clean-living family man — albeit very much after his own fashion. His id still overflows nonstop — along with his R-rated language — and his conversations zigzag from the philosophical to the practical to the scatalogical in the span of a few sentences. All of this comes out clearly in a brilliant cover feature from Esquire’s March 2007 issue:

He’s looking at me as a car cuts us off, and I reflexively reach for the wheel as he hits the brakes and the spring-loaded Buddha on the dashboard starts bobbling madly. He waves off my apology — Downey, not Buddha. Buddha can go f*** himself.

“I want you to feel completely free to let all your codependent neuroses out,” he tells me. “You can grab the wheel, you can ask me if my tummy hurts, you can give me a foot rub later, anything. Enmeshment is really okay in small doses.”

Small doses? A dab of Downey — trust me — would fill this magazine cover to cover. Which makes a couple of hours sitting and talking at the Chateau Marmont perfect; we have only met, and I’ve brought — just in case conversation lags — my carefully researched notes.

“Me too,” he says.

You have notes? “I do, yeah. I actually already printed out the article if you’d like to read it. It really went great.”

But I’m worried about the lead. I need to redo the lead.

“You don’t need a lead,” Downey purrs. “Dude, the lead’s about to happen.”

Even better, as this post from Jason Craft points out, Downey is channeling all of this hyperkinetic energy and all his crazy foibles into his roles:

[Downey] took his issues past a point where we understood them within a revival or “bad boy with a heart of gold” narrative: he got bothersome, and let us give up. He didn’t publicly apologize in the mode we’re accustomed to now. He didn’t get Christian: he just hit rock bottom. We figured he’d be in jail until we forgot about him.

But he then lived. What’s more, he understood himself as the man lost and found again, the prodigal, and performed it.

In Iron Man, Downey’s Tony Stark is a louche billionaire playboy who develops a sense of morality after seeing human suffering up close. Yet even after this transformation, Stark/Iron Man remains as impulsive as ever. It’s just that now his impulses are channeled to better ends — something like Downey himself.

Besides the celebrity-redemption interest, I think there’s a general-purpose career lesson hiding in Downey’s story: You’ll be at your best not when you’re stifling all your impulses and personality, but when you’re channeling everything you have — both the virtuous and the weird — into positive efforts.

2. What the heck took Marvel so long bringing these characters to the screen?

I spent many, many hours of my childhood poring over comics. (I was profligate: I absorbed Marvel and DC stories in equal measure.) Tim Burton’s original Batman hit theaters when I was still in high school, but it would be many more years before Marvel took Spider-Man — surely one of the most bankable characters ever — and made a huge movie franchise out of it.

A quick tour of IMDB’s listing of all-time worldwide box office receipts reveals a LOT of Marvel:

11. — Spider-Man 3 (2007) — $885,430,303
18. — Spider-Man (2002) — $806,700,000
22. — Spider-Man 2 (2004) — $783,577,893
67. — X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) — $455,260,014
182. — X-Men (2000) — $294,100,000
248. — Hulk (2003) — $241,700,000

Even Daredevil, which was not nearly so well regarded, grossed nearly $180 million worldwide.

If you know of any analysis that explains Marvel’s long delay, please leave a comment that points me to it. Whatever the cause of the delay, Marvel sure seems to have its act together now. Without giving away the ending of Iron Man (and uh, be sure to stick around through the end of the credits), it’s clear that the film is ripe for a sequel. And Marvel is also queueing up the second installment of its Hulk series for next month, this time bearing the imprint of Transporter director Louis Leterrier and heavyweight actor Edward Norton.

In related news, director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale will follow up on their 2005 hit Batman Begins with its sequel, The Dark Knight, in July.

Could be a very good summer for old comic-book geeks like me.

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* A caveat: I’m glad I didn’t take my under-13 kids to see it, because some of the scenes are pretty intense.

(Photo: EW via Gizmodo.)

Category: Entertainment