utters that line again at the end of Avengers: Endgame just before he snaps his fingers, destroys Thanos and his minions and saves the universe. Tony openly declares, “I am Iron Man” at the end of the first Iron Man movie, in part as an act of egotism. Ultimately, however, Beck is a foil to Tony Stark and ends up reminding Peter and the audience of Iron Man’s heroism. In the months since Avengers: Endgame hit theaters, audiences (and, it turns out, the characters in the Avengers universe) have embraced Tony as a hero who sacrificed his own life, a generally happy one, to save the universe. Beck complains that Tony did not appreciate the possibilities of the technology and chafes at the dismissive “BARF” acronym.īeck offers a rousing speech to his compatriots about how irresponsible Tony Stark was - both in life as an egotistical playboy with an addictive personality and in death as he entrusts the world’s most powerful technology to a teenage boy ill-equipped to handle the responsibility. In that scene, Tony relives his last interaction with his parents explaining it’s an “extremely costly method of hijacking the hippocampus to clear traumatic memories.” He later calls it “$611 million for my little therapeutic experiment,” in a scene that’s replayed from Beck’s perspective in Spider-Man: Far From Home. And in Spider-Man: Homecoming, Adrian Toomes becomes the villain the Vulture after Stark Industries puts him out of a job.įor his part, Beck invented the incredibly-realistic hologram technology that Tony dubs BARF (Binary Augmented Retro-Framing), which Tony uses during a presentation at M.I.T. In Iron Man 3, Aldrich Killian becomes a supervillain after Tony declines to join his burgeoning tech company, humiliating him. In Iron Man 2, Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash tries to kill Tony because Tony’s father stole Whiplash’s father’s ideas. Beck joins a long list of men who seek to hurt the Avengers after their technological innovations are spurned by Tony or his father. (Though, admittedly, Peter’s desire to tell MJ that he likes her is much sweeter than Tony’s boozing and gambling.)īut the more negative aspects of Tony Stark’s legacy remain too: Gyllenhaal’s Beck reveals himself to be a jilted former employee of Tony Stark and turns out to be the primary villain of Far From Home. Even their evolutions are the same, from men in pursuit of more selfish gains to men who evolve to act selflessly and heroically.
He builds a new Spider-Man suit using Iron Man’s technology as the AC/DC song from the first Iron Man film plays in the background. Peter is shown with hair styled like Tony, wearing Tony’s glasses. The film keeps drawing parallels between Peter and Tony.
Still, the audience knows it’s really Peter who is fated to take Iron Man’s place.