2008 would mark the release of Iron Man and due to a now trade mark post-credit scene, the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A series of films connected to one another but in different places much like their comic source material only now on a $200 million blockbuster scale. Iron Man would also mark the start of Marvel Entertainment (parent company to all this) owning the films based on their characters via Marvel Studios a move that would vertically integrate the production of its IP. This move would be entirely different from Marvel’s business model around the turn of the century, licensing their characters out to various movie studios thus never really having full control of how their property was treated. It’s a move that gave us the Rami Spider Man and Singer X-Men films (the gold standards of turn of the century superhero cinema) but also the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and Hulk all films that not without their qualities are most defiantly uneven.

Viewing Iron Man through the lens of the Heroes’ Journey, isn’t anything new. Proposed by Joseph Campbell in 1949s The Hero with a Thousand Faces it was Campbell’s grand unifying theory of all mythology. Campbell broke down the core of all stories into 12 tropes that can then be divided into three acts forming the basic structure for all myth. There have been whole books dedicated to applying its structure to years of film and a cursory Google search shows Iron Man isn’t exempt. Hence, why, it is referred to as the Monomyth, borrowed from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The ability to graft this structure on to a wide range of media makes it among the most known ways to structure well anything, you’ve all seen Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and The Fugitive. This isn’t to say the Monomyth is the end all be all of narrative structure, it has plenty of detractors just like any tool. I’m not even all that jazzed about it but when the shoe fits.

Iron Man follows this structure to a letter and why wouldn’t it? It is the most well known structures for narrative in the western world. It may not be consciously understood though but due to the population’s mass intake of media that this structure can be applied to, audiences subconsciously recognize the familiar structure. Like my film professor always says at the beginning of one of her classes, everyone there knows film they just don’t know it yet. By using this as a template it allows Marvel Studios to tap into the mass unconscious of their audience and bring them along for the ride by using a well worn path while they are also charmed by Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark and introduced to a world of men in metal suits and super heroics.

There is also a very clear production reason for using this structure. Iron Man is credited to four different writers composing of two teams of two, Arthur Marcum & Matt Holloway and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, each team writing separate scripts with director John Favreau serving as an intermediary and compiler of these two scripts. This isn’t anything new to the writing of major studio pictures and also why most major studio pictures have an inoffensive amount of saminess. Favreau also handed the script off for polish to John August. Not counting whatever amount of change August may have brought to the script (likely just polishing dialog) this is still 4 credited writers and the director working as a committee to make one thing out of two separate articles. Now I haven’t read either teams drafts and neither will you unless you get it from the writers themselves (if you do please share). In bringing these two elements together and crafting a good arc for its lead, the heroes’ journey would likely be extremely useful joiner. There is a reason why it is always represented as a circle, the call to adventure and eventual return (but slightly changed protagonist), it serves as a closed arc. Most importantly if you follow these steps, theoretically, you should have at least a lead character that has an arc for the film to hang on providing an emotional foundation to further expand upon.

Even before Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, Hollywood studios had hammered out the basic genre structures for the majority of their films at the time. One of the key features across genre was the use of mirrors or echos of earlier sequences as a means to structure everything. The baseball player has to save his team by hitting the home run in the first act and fails only to finally pull it out at the climax. These echoes breed a familiarity with the audience and for audiences that sees a lot of movies have the effect of making them feel smarter for figuring out the climax before it happens. Familiarity breeds understanding and acceptance if it’s a space adventure or story about men in metal suits battling over a hazily defined macguffin.

May 2, 2008 came and the MCU was born, by the end of its run Iron Man would gross $585.1 million against a $140 million budget and stand next to Batman Begins as the article from which all origin story films are judged. Iron Man for me is more useful as an emotional scale, Begins is structured like a watch and just hits the beats when they need to but is kind of emotionally dead compared to Iron Man. All of this isn’t just because Iron Man plot and story can be grafted onto the Heroes Journey. It works because it is a good film on multiple levels: Robert Downey Jr. commands the screen, the few actions sequences are well enough executed and more importantly inform character like all great action does among other things. All of this happens to occur atop a familiar structure.By the end of the film Tony has gone from billionaire playboy douchebag to something resembling a billionaire playboy philanthropist. It’s an effective arc that the entire film hangs on.

Further Reading

• Excepts from Myth and the Movies, Stuart Voytilla Foreword By Christopher Vogler
• From Mythology Teacher the stages of the Heroes’ Journey their main page on the structure, includes some worksheets and film breakdowns.
• FilmCritHulk on his dislike of the Heroes Journey and the Myth of the 3 Act Structure

I am Michael Mazzacane and you can find on Twitter @MaZZM and at weekntv.com and comicweek.com