Wednesday creators Miles Millar and Al Gough have discussed their early work on an Iron Man script for Marvel — back when Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise was “interested” in the lead role.
Millar and Gough have a number of superhero projects to their names, including Smallville and Spider-Man 2, and it was after working on the latter that Marvel Studios founder Avi Arad contacted the pair to ask if they’d be interested in adapting Iron Man.
What happened next almost led to a very different Marvel Cinematic Universe to the one we know today, with Cruise kicking off the MCU proper as Tony Stark (and potentially also becoming Doctor Doom!). But first, however, the pair needed to be told who Iron Man actually was.
“Avi Arad had come to us after Spider-Man 2,” Gough recalled, speaking via the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “It was literally [in] this small office on Santa Monica Boulevard, down from Century City mall. They kept things very lean and mean, so when you’re sitting in a room, it was literally the two of us, Kevin [Feige] and Avi.
“‘Guys, we’ve got another crown jewel – which is Iron Man,'” Millar said they were told.
“To be honest with you, I hadn’t heard of Iron Man,” Gough continued, “and Avi goes: ‘Perfect, here’s what he is. He’s a billionaire who sells weapons, he’s got an alcohol problem, and there was an accident, now he’s trying to make it work, make it better.’ We thought, ‘Oh, this is interesting, this is different, this isn’t another teen superhero, after Smallville and Spider-Man.’ So we were like, okay.”
At the time, Marvel was attempting to work with Lord of the Rings production company New Line Cinema on the project, and Gough recalled the fateful meeting where everything began to fall through.
“We did a draft, several drafts,” he recalled. “We worked on that for probably a year. And we went in with Kevin and Avi, and I remember [New Line Cinema boss] Bob Shaye had read it. It’s an interesting thing with generations trying to still connect with what a superhero is. [Shaye] got all tied up that Iron Man could fly, he goes, ‘Because Superman could fly, could he leap from building to building?’ We all sort of walked out of the meeting like, ‘We don’t think this is going to happen here.'”
Marvel ultimately pressed on with the idea for an Iron Man film, obtaining the rights to develop the project itself and ultimately settling on Robert Downey Jr. in his now iconic-role as the MCU’s billionaire playboy philanthropist. After that point, though, Gough’s script was not moved forward, and the pair’s involvement ceased.
“To Kevin and Ari’s great credit, they got the character back and they did the version which is basically fantastic,” Gough noted.
When asked who Marvel had initially wanted in the film’s role during their tenure, the pair both attested to the studio having been in talks with Cruise.
“They wanted Tom Cruise, and I think Tom Cruise was interested,” Millar said.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Cruise’s name has been linked to the role of Iron Man, before Downey Jr. ultimately won the part. Back in 2012, Cruise told IGN that Marvel had approached him about the role, but said it ultimately “just didn’t feel to me like it was gonna work.”
Fast forward two decades and the casting still remains a topic of conversation for fans — enough that when Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness introduced alternate universe versions of Marvel heroes, a Tom Cruise variant of Iron Man was again discussed.
Doctor Strange writer Michael Waldron even asked Kevin Feige about the possibility of a Tom Cruise cameo, but was told that Cruise’s schedule shooting Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning had ruled him out.
Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
