Arguing over the best or most important movies is a seeming national pastime for anyone with even a passing interest in American film culture or movies at large. Just recently Film Twitter got into a kerfuffle over various director’s top ten lists that ended up making the Sight & Sound Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time where films like Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Godfather, and Vertigo all bounce up and down vying for the top spot. Similarly, people view what gains entry to the Library of Congress’s yearly preservation list the same way.
Now Iron Man has been entered into the National Film Registry to stand tall alongside such other American movies as The Grapes of Wrath, The African Queen and All The President’s Men as a film emblematic of American culture and worthy of preservation.
When Kevin Feige was made aware of the honor, he had this to say: “Iron Man was the very first film Marvel Studios independently produced. It was the first film that we had all of the creative control and oversight on and it was really make or break for the studio.” The movie, directed by Jon Favreau, was originally intended as a one-off with its Avengers-connecting Nick Fury end credits inserted after test screenings looked promising. Robert Downey, Jr. was a talented actor with a middling career, just starting to get himself back on track after a derailment involving drugs and jail stints, and the character of Iron Man was a B-to-C-tier nobody that, like a Blade had an interesting premise and not much more. If the film went nowhere, nothing big would be hurt by it.
While some purists might scoff at the idea of a recently made superhero movie joining the list, it’s certainly not the first (1978’s Superman joined the registry in 2017 and 1936’s Flash Gordon made the grade way back in 1996) and it’s emblematic of a huge cultural shift in American film going and production. As Feige says, “All of our favorite movies are the ones that we watch over and over again and that we grow up with. The notion that here we are, almost 15 years after the release of Iron Man, and to have it join the Film Registry tells us it has stood the test of time and that it is still meaningful to audiences around the world.”
When the film became a mega-success, and the MCU was born, it became a game changer. But whereas even other MCU origin story movies have a by-now formulaic quality about them, 2008’s Iron Man was something special. The type of lightning-in-a-bottle kismet that only comes along with a Star Wars or a Ghostbusters, rare and once in a generation, in other words. Iron Man joins the registry amongst other movies such as Brian de Palma’s 1976 horror masterpiece, Carrie, Rob Reiner’s 1989 romantic comedy classic, When Harry Met Sally, and Disney’s 1989 start to their “Disney Renaissance,” The Little Mermaid.
Iron Man is streaming on Disney+.
Source: Library of Congress