Iron Man: Marvel Studios didn’t want Black Sabbath’s music

Iron man : a cult movie

In 2008, the very first Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movie hit theaters. It was about Iron man, a superhero not well known to the general public who has gained an unprecedented aura thanks to the staging of Jon Favreau, but also thanks to the interpretation of Robert downey jr. in the role of Tony Stark. Iron man receives press and popular feedback extremely positive. The public doesn’t know it yet, but they’ve just seen the MCU’s infancy, the most impressive connected universe in the history of cinema.

Iron man is even appointed to twice at the Oscars and bring back more than $ 585 million in box office receipts (for a budget of 140 million). Faced with this success, two other parts of the saga Iron man will see the light of day, respectively in 2010 and 2013.

Marvel vs Black Sabbath

Iron man also marked the spirits thanks to its soundtrack taken by the biggest titles of AC DC. An ultra catchy soundtrack that perfectly matched this new hero. Another iconic song also ended up in the film. It is obviously about Iron man and Black Sabbath. Obviously, which was almost absent from the film. Indeed, Jeremy Latchman, the former vice president of production and development at Marvel Studios, recently recounted that some executives refused to pay the exploitation rights for the iconic song of the band Black Sabbath.

The recent book The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which brings together many anecdotes from the first twelve years of the MCU, returned to a controversial element of the first Iron man. Indeed, at the time, Kevin Feige and his team refused to buy the rights to the song Iron man by Black Sabbath. Apparently, Jeremy Latchman was forced to convince them to spend the extra money to acquire the title:

I said, ‘Here’s what I know, you pay me to tell you what I think is cool. I’m telling you this song is cool. I’m telling you if you don’t take the song Iron Man, it’s not cool. It is obvious “. We finally got them to agree to pay Ozzy Osbourne, just a week before Comic-Con.

Although Marvel Studios already had access to a certain amount of money at the time, in 2008, the studio was still independent. Indeed, it did not yet belong to the Disney hegemony, who bought the studio in 2009. Iron man had been partly funded by Paramount. In other words, the use of music in audiovisual works can be expensive. Especially if this music belongs to a group like Black Sabbath. Fortunately, Jeremy Latchman was able to convince his colleagues that it was a good idea. And indeed, Iron man without music Iron man, would not have actually been Iron Man …