I want to share this detail because I think it gets overlooked with all the awesome Marvel movie moments. Let me start by saying that I like numbers better than Roman numerals. You’ll appreciate me for that as you read.
Tony’s suit in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) was the first time fans got to see iron man make a suit from nanotechnology. his first suit-up scene in infinity war served as the big reveal for Iron Man’s nanotech breakthrough, and it arguably became the armored avenger’s most iconic mcu suit-up sequence.
I can watch that scene 100x a day and not get tired of it. (I still like the original mk 0003 suit-up the best). ((Remind me to make a post about my favorite iron man suits)).
tony labeled the infinity war suit “mk 0050,” because it was the fiftieth suit of armor he’d made since the mk 0001 in 2008’s iron man.
What Marvel didn’t reveal till the next avengers movie, though, was that this wasn’t the first suit that Tony built once he made his nanotech discovery.
The last iron man suit that we saw before infinity war was Mk 0047, in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017). It was simply a repainted render of the mk 0046 suit from 2016’s captain america: civil war (which i found out from longtime Marvel studios artist Phil Saunders last year), so it looked and functioned exactly how iron man’s suit did in the captain america threequel.
It wasn’t until infinity war that fans got to see iron man’s breakthrough nanotech (as well as an upgraded hulkbuster suit he made before that–mk 0048), but curiously we never saw mk 0049–a missing suit of armor made somewhere between homecoming and infinity war.
A year later, avengers: endgame gave Iron Man fans a huge comic book payoff when it teased Pepper’s RESCUE suit at the beginning of the movie, and then showed the suit in action during the film’s final battle sequence.
We saw towards the beginning of Avengers: Endgame that the suit that Tony made for Pepper was also made with nanotechnology.
when Tony takes Pepper’s helmet off of his daughter, Morgan, you can see the nanoparticles retract from the backside of the helmet. More convincingly, We later see Pepper conjuring different weapons alongside iron man with the same nanotechnology he used in infinity war.
The suit that Tony made for Pepper is labeled “Mk 0049″ (seen above), meaning this is the first suit of armor that tony made once he discovered his nanotechnology.
Pepper’s always been weary about Tony’s tinkering, so it’s unlikely this is her own forty-ninth suit of armor. Rhodey’s war machine armor follows its own chronology (he’s on mk 0007 as of endgame), but everything in the stark household seems to stand in the same collection–hulkbusters and all.
A constant theme in the mcu is iron man’s adaptability. He’s the ultimate example of an avenger because he learns from his mistakes and his shortcomings and he builds back better, ensuring he doesn’t make the same mistake twice.
Every upgrade he adds to his armor–whether it be his own or his that of his loved ones–is a direct response to something he couldn’t stop from happening before.
My favorite example of this is the parachute he installed in Peter’s spider-man suit in homecoming after Rhodey suffered that gruesome fall in civil war.
Another fave of mine is when iron man’s mk 0006 armor is able to absorb and redirect the energy from Thor’s lightning blast in the avengers because tony had already had to improve his armor to be able to withstand electric attacks after his run-ins with whiplash in iron man 2.
In this case, you can look back to iron man 3 and how Tony’s armor fell short in protecting pepper more than once. In fact, it nearly cost pepper her life at the end of the movie. So what does tony do as soon as he figures out a more reliable technology to protect himself? He gives it to pepper.
He puts together the mk 0049 to protect his iron wifey before he makes the mk 0050 for himself and the rest of the world.
i remember reading somewhere that tony realized he couldn’t put a suit of armor around the world so he put a suit of armor around his world. Hits deep.
these are the types of posts you can expect from me on the weekly. Just random details and nuances about my long list of favorite movies, and anything involving iron man sits atop of that list.
