In our previous article touching on the new book by Disney CEO Bob Iger — The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company — we touched on how and why Disney decided to discard George Lucas’ ideas for the new trilogy and Lucas’ disappointment with Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Now we’ve got another juicy story from the book.
Ask any MCU fan what the worst film in the franchise is and I think most would answer Iron Man 2. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 is perhaps the only genuinely crappy film in the franchise, one that focused too much on expanding the universe that it forgot to tell a standalone story whatsoever. Well, it looks like the late founder of Apple (not the fruit obviously), Steve Jobs, did not like the film one bit either.
In his book, Iger recalls (via ScreenRant):
“When Iron Man 2 came out, Steve [Jobs] took his son to see it and called me the next day. ‘I took Reed to see Iron Man 2 last night,’ he said. ‘It sucked.’”
At the time — this was back in 2010 — Steve Jobs was a board member at Disney and also their largest shareholder.
Previously, when promoting his book to Vanity Fair, Bob Iger talked about the advice Jobs gave him regarding the purchase of Marvel Studios.
“In 2009, after our very successful acquisition of Pixar, we were interested in acquiring Marvel, so I met with Steve and walked him through the business. He claimed to have never read a comic book in his life (‘I hate them more than I hate video games,’ he told me), so I brought an encyclopedia of Marvel characters with me to explain the universe to him and show him what we would be buying. He spent about 10 seconds looking at it, then pushed it aside and said, ‘Is this one important to you? Do you really want it? Is it another Pixar?’”
