Credit: 20th Century Fox
Sat 17 October 2026 15:15, UK
If you’ve found yourself thinking ‘Haven’t seen Robert Downey Jr, for a while’ at some point recently, then worry not; that is about to change in a big way.
Many of us found ourselves in an IMAX this month watching the newly polished and extended (as if that were needed) version of Avengers: Endgame, which the Russo brothers decided to title Encore. It meant they could basically release almost exactly the same film as before, make a shedload more money off it, but just add a couple of new post-credits scenes to bridge the gap to December’s free-for-all insanity that will be Doomsday.
And did we fall for it? You bet, and it was just as good as, if not better than, the first time around back in 2019, as Thor, Captain America, Captain Marvel and the borderline pointless Ant-Man defeated Thanos and undid his giant finger-snap that caused so many issues and temporarily dead people in Infinity War. Downey Jr had retired Tony Stark, and all was peaceful.
“But wait!” said Marvel back in 2024, “We’re aren’t done with Downey Jr, not by a long chalk” and out he came in a scary silver Doctor Doom mask at Comic-Con to much ‘WTFing’ from the audience. Now here we are trying to get our heads around how the MCU’s goateed hero can possibly be the bad guy, or whether they are in fact two completely different entities and they just fancied casting the same world-famous movie star, which seems unlikely in all honesty.
Either way, Downey Jr will be splashed liberally across the biggest cinema screens in the UK on December 18th, and millions will lap up what is reportedly the most expensive film ever made and quite possibly one that will turn out to be the highest-grossing in history. And therein lies the reason for his relative disappearing act: these enormous films take a long, long time to make, and he’s about to have to do it all over again for Avengers: Secret Wars next year.
He will, however, also mix it up a bit with a return to one of his other franchise roles in a third Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movie, which again is good news because the first two of those were excellent, he and Jude Law bouncing off each other (steady now) with some great chemistry, as well as Rachel McAdams being suitably scene-stealing as Irene Adler.
Despite only just ticking into his 60s, Downey Jr has been around an awfully long time now, showing himself to be comfortable in almost every genre you can think of and spanning some five decades since making his breakthrough in the mid-1980s as a sometime Brat Pack member and appearing in fare typical of the era, such as Weird Science and Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
He made a dozen films in the five years leading up to 1990, but didn’t take everything on, and when asked by Howard Stern back in 2016 if he’d ever turned any big movies down, he answered: “Yeah, I’ve done that once or twice,” before citing Cameron Crowe’s 1989 hit Say Anything… as an example. He added, “John Cusack did that and it ended up being really good.”
A zeitgeist-capturing movie if ever there was one, Say Anything… starred Cusack as an average high-school student trying to win the heart of the star pupil, the film becoming famous for his character holding up a boombox in her front garden while blasting out Peter Gabriel, rather than just taking no for an answer and leaving her alone.
Downey Jr wasn’t too upset about having to take a smaller role in the film than Cusack, however, explaining, “I didn’t feel sad; I thought it was trite. But it turned out to be a good movie.” Given what’s happened to him in the years since, it’s unlikely he thinks about what might have been too often.
