Jon Favreau’s Iron Man Comic Bombed as Hard as His MCU Movies Succeeded

Jon Favreau was instrumental in launching the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man. However, when the talented director and actor decided to take on the character in the comics, his series failed big time. Favreau’s Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas came out around the same time as his iconic 2008 film but only ended up releasing two of four issues before it was permanently shelved.

Few people are more critical to the success of the MCU than Jon Favreau. The director spearheaded 2008’s Iron Man film and fought to cast Robert Downey Jr. in the lead role, a move that turned out to be a stroke of genius. Favreau would direct both Iron Man and Iron Man 2 while also playing Happy Hogan in those films and the MCU’s Spider-Man and Avengers movies. In addition, Favreau would continue to work with Disney outside the MCU, directing 2019’s The Lion King and creating an executive producing the wildly popular and critically acclaimed Star Wars series, The Mandalorian on Disney+.

In 2008, Favreau, Adi Granov, and Chris Eliopoulos teamed up for a four-part Marvel Knights series, Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas, that came out a few months after the first Iron Man film. The comic allowed Favreau to break out of the restrictive story confinements of the movie universe and take Tony Stark in a new direction. The story involves Stark at Stark Casino, while a statue of a golden dragon at a rival casino causes a plague of lizards to overwhelm the city. It turns out the statue is actually Fin Fang Foom, causing the hero to suit up and take on the giant dragon-like alien.

However, before readers could see Iron Man take on Fin Fang Foom, the series was shelved. Only two issues ever came out before Marvel Comics decided not to continue with the series. Favreau’s commitments to other projects surely didn’t help the production schedule of the issue. In the end, Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas was never finished.

What makes Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas such an interesting failure was that it didn’t try to replicate the movie’s success and was basically Favreau doing another take on Tony Stark while loosely connecting to the MCU. Iron Man never battled Fin Fang Foom, had a casino, or met non-MCU characters like Elsa Bloodstone in the movies. Perhaps, the series was too much of a curveball for fans of Iron Man. It’s easy to imagine the series would have been better received if it continued his MCU adventures. Alas, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man comic, unlike his MCU projects, was a big swing and a miss.

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Liam McGuire
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Lead writer for Screen Rant’s comic team. [email protected]. Find me on Twitter @LiamRMcGuire for comic news and reporting.

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