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While we all were marveling at Robert Downey Jr.‘s return to the MCU, Gwyneth Paltrow entered the chat — or rather, the comments section — to share her take.
At San Diego Comic Con over the weekend, Downey Jr. revealed his upcoming role of Doctor Doom (Victor von Doom) in Avengers: Doomsday, which is slated to hit theaters in May 2026, followed by Avengers: Secret Wars in May 2027, per Entertainment Weekly.
The Oppenheimer Oscar winner also took to Instagram, sharing a picture of himself staring into his new mask, as well as a video of unmasking himself during Saturday’s (July 27) panel. As Downey Jr. exclaimed on Saturday, his post was captioned as follows: “New mask, same task.”
“What did I tell you? I like playing complicated characters,” Downey Jr. said on stage.
According to EW, Paltrow, who played Pepper Potts in seven Marvel films over the course of over a decade, aired her apparent confusion in the comments
“I don’t get it, are you a baddie now?” she wrote.
While a November 2023 Variety report had suggested that Marvel was considering bringing back Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige shot down the claim to Vanity Fair, explaining — with reference to Iron Man’s demise — that they “are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again.”
“We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way,” he added.
At the Red Sea Film Festival in December, Paltrow revealed that they “had such a good time” and “improvised almost every scene” of Iron Man, which hit theaters back in 2008.
“We would write it in the morning in [director] Jon [Favreau]’s trailer, and it was like doing [an indie] film,” she shared at the time. Then, the movie was such a huge hit that we didn’t make them like that anymore.”
