The Real Reason Tom Cruise Didn't Play Iron Man In The MCU

While Robert Downey Jr. and Tony Stark have become pretty much synonymous ever since 2008's "Iron Man," there was a time in the late '90s when Tom Cruise considered suiting up as the armored Avenger. And now we know why that never came to be thanks to "MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios" by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards.

"When the Iron Man rights were at 20th Century Fox, Tom Cruise, then 34, had flirted with the idea of playing Stark," the book reads (via Time). "However, Cruise's asking fee at the time was more than even a profitable studio like Fox was willing to risk on an untested superhero property." It's unclear what that asking fee was, but it was simply too much to gamble on, especially when Iron Man was a relatively obscure hero compared to the other properties Fox held the film rights for at the time, like the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.

Years later, the role would fall to Downey, and the MCU was born. Compared to Cruise, the high school dropout Downey, a controversial pick for Iron Man due to his public struggles with substance abuse, cost just $2.5 million. But it was more than the paycheck that turned the "Mission: Impossible" star away.

Tom Cruise is notorious for being hands-on with his projects, something that has apparently been true for decades. And when he was approached for the role of Tony Stark, the film he was presented with didn't align with his vision. "If I commit to something, it has to be done in a way that I know it's gonna be something special," he told IGN in 2005. "And as it was lining up, it just didn't feel to me like it was gonna work. I need to be able to make decisions and make the film as great as it can be, and it just didn't go down that road that way."

Many fans were hopeful we would see Cruise's Iron Man in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," but screenwriter Michael Waldron has since confirmed that the idea was never even on the table — despite all the fan art online imagining what could have been. At the same time, it's hard to picture anyone other than Robert Downey Jr. as the genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. But the Marvel Cinematic Universe sure could have turned out a lot differently had Cruise had a lower asking price.