Iron Man 3 Secretly Set Up Tony’s Best Superhero Successor

screenrant.com:

MCU devotees continue to debate over who will inherit Iron Man's legacy in the MCU, but Iron Man 3 already paved the way for Tony Stark's best successor. Iron Man casts a long, looming shadow over the MCU landscape, and will likely continue to do so for decades to come. That makes total sense, as Robert Downey Jr.'s snarky superhero was the first character to lead an MCU movie, and had the first Iron Man not taken off, it's possible the entire MCU experiment would've been doomed to fail.

If Marvel Studios had the option, it's not hard to imagine they would have kept Downey around for much longer, content to use his star power to continue to boost the MCU's fortunes to even greater heights. That wasn't in the cards though, as after a decade playing Tony Stark, Downey wanted out, leading to Iron Man's emotionally devastating ending at the conclusion of Avengers: Endgame. If Iron Man had to die, though, he couldn't have hoped to do it any better, going out surrounded by friends, and after saving the universe one last time.

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Since Iron Man's demise, much time has been spent both in and out of the MCU debating who can possibly hope to fill the void he left behind and be his immediate successor. The most obvious candidate seems like Ironheart, the subject of an upcoming Disney+ show, but Spider-Man and Tony's own daughter Morgan also seem like possibilities. Yet, most aspects of this debate ignore the person who should be the most obvious choice to take over his work: Tony's wife Pepper Potts. Pepper has her own Iron Man-like Rescue super suit as seen in Endgame and knows how to use it, has access to all of Tony's resources and knowledge, and could even justifiably be