Hello.
It's Rhodes.
Sorry, hello?
I said, it's Rhodes.
Speak up please.
This is Rhodey.
a.k.a.
War Machine.
Next time, baby.
I'm only going to say this once.
Get out.
This is Rhodey.
a.k.a.
War Machine.
The former is played by actor and Academy Award nominee
Terrence Howard.
The latter is played by actor and Academy Award nominee Don
Cheadle for the remainder of the MCU's run.
You're probably not all that confused, because you probably
know that this switch was made.
Look.
It's me.
I'm here.
Deal with it.
Terrence Howard was quickly replaced after the first Iron
Man film.
But you might not know why.
There's a big happy family fallacy
within these big franchises that consistently
gets torn down and torn apart by the media when you realize
what's going on underneath.
Acting in major motion pictures is a profession
in which multimillion dollar contracts are commonplace.
And with that kind of money moving around,
friendly may not be the best word
to describe what's actually happening behind the scenes.
Tricky contractual language can often give studios
complete control over what they pay
their actors and leverage becomes
a quintessential element in that process.
Money over relationships.
Terrence Howard was heading into production
on Iron Man fresh off of an Academy Award
nomination for Hustle and Flow.
When an actor is nominated for an Oscar,
their value to a project increases dramatically.
And in turn, so usually does their pay rate.
This is part of the reason actors
want to win these awards.
Or at least be in the conversation.
It's usually not the main reason, let's be honest.
They want to be great actors.
They're artists.
Sure, there's a lot of prestige in winning the highest award
an actor can possibly win.
But having the title of Oscar winner on a resume
means that they can also charge more for their performances.
By the time Iron Man was rolling into production,
Terrence Howard's rate was set around $3.5 to $4
and 1/2 million that performance.
This made him one of the highest paid actors in the film.
And at that time, the highest paid actor in the film.
He was actually paid over six times more
than Robert Downey Jr. who people forget
was kind of making a return to film in a big way.
His life, his trials, his career is a whole different story.
Now one of the most famous men in the world
was at one time kind of a has-been.
He only made about $500,000 for his role in the first film.
In pure studio on set money.
Iron Man went on to be an enormous success.
It received overwhelming praise from critics and fans alike
and it ultimately led to the creation
of the largest and most successful
cinematic universe of all time.
When a project like Iron Man is successful enough
to create a franchise, it's usually
great for everyone involved.
The directors and producers get bigger budgets for the sequels,
and the actors usually get a nice pay raise.
Especially when that film grosses over $300 million
like the original Iron Man did.
Normally something like that would mean enormous contracts
getting signed.
And the principal performers holding the pen
on the other side of them.
Robert Downey Jr. Is rumored to have made $10 million
for the second film.
A pay increase of about 2,000%.
Not to mention he was able to negotiate a back end
deal for even more money based on the revenue
of the film at the box office.
Terrence Howard, on the other hand,
was actually offered a significant decrease in pay
from what he was expecting to earn.
I'm jealous.
Marvel eventually offered only $1 million
to come back as War Machine, which
is far less than the alleged $8 million
he was supposed to have made for the sequel based
on the conversations with his agent and the studio.
It was even less than what he made for the first film.
So here's where things start to get a little messy
and a little muddy.
It's rumored that Iron Man director John
Favreau was ultimately unhappy with Terrence Howard's
performance and spent a lot of time
cutting down his scenes in post.
This isn't great from both a artistic perspective,
and more pertinently here, a financial perspective
being that if a studio is going to pay premium
dollars for a specific actor based on essentially
their name, they're expecting that actor
to have a relatively large presence in the film.
To be able to use them for marketing moving forward.
When producers, directors, and editors cut down that screen
time, it makes the value proposition of those contracts
seem a little less responsible.
Allegedly, Jon Favreau was so dissatisfied
with Terrance Howard's performance,
that he and Iron Man 2 writer Justin Theroux ended up scaling
down Rhodey's role in the second film
altogether under the assumption that Howard would
be James Rhodes once again.
Once Marvel Studios found out that War Machine's role was
going to be featured in diminished capacity,
they came to Terrence Howard's agents
with a counteroffer to his $8 million contract
to be more in line with what they were expecting to pay
a supporting actor at the time.
That $1 million number.
Now an agent's job is to protect the financial interest
of their client.
What likely ended up happening behind the scenes,
and this is where pure conjecture starts,
is that his agent and publicist would
want to not only ensure that their client was paid
in a way that was commensurate with the rest of the leading
cast, but to make sure that Terrence Howard's future roles
would be measured against a larger contract,
not diminish his potential for financial returns in the future
on the next film or the film after that.
After the dust settled, Terrence Howard
had essentially walked away from the role
due to this financial dispute and was ultimately replaced
with Don Cheadle, who happily signed on
to play War Machine in Iron Man 2 for that million dollars.
I think I'll take it.
Which one?
All of it.
Since then, it's rumored that Don Cheadle has amassed
a combined total of around $40 million
in earnings across his work at the MCU.
Role also landed him an Emmy nomination
for his performance in The Falcon and Winter Soldier.
In a 2010 interview with E Online,
Howard publicly claimed that he was
the one who recommended RDJ for the role of Iron Man,
but that he ultimately was happy with the way things turned out.
In the interview, he almost takes
sole credit for Robert Downey Jr.'s Success
by saying for me to have recommended him,
it means all the more so that I helped
someone get to where they are supposed to go.
John Favreau stated that at one time
Marvel said to him, under no circumstances
are we prepared to hire Robert Downey Jr. For any price.
So maybe there's something to that.
But we'll never really know.
Howard would get a little more upset as time went on.
Over the next couple of years, you
could almost link Howard's frustrations directly
to the success of Marvel films.
The more successful those films became,
the more Howard lashed out against Marvel to the media.
Is there any chance you'd come back and do an Avenger movie?
[BLEEP]
In 2013, Avengers had made $1.5 billion at the box office.
And at this time, Howard took to the media once more,
was a little more candid.
In 2013 interview with Hollywood.com,
Terrence Howard teased that the worst thing he had ever
witnessed in Hollywood was--
Iron Man killing my career.
In another interview with Vulture.com,
Howard took the drama even further
by saying that Robert Downey Jr. Took the money that
was supposed to go to him and pushed him out of the sequel.
The reality of all this drama is likely much more simple
than any of this paints it out to be.
Terrence Howard was being let go from a project
for delivering a subpar performance
and not wanting to take the ego hit of having
a potentially future subpar performance cut down
by the studio.
Robert Downey Jr. kept quiet about all of this
because he didn't want to ruin his opportunity that was almost
denied to him because of his previous struggles
with addiction and drugs.
This was a once in a lifetime shot at redemption for him.
At the end of the day, the studio's job
is to create the most profitable film possible.
These films operate on stringent budgets.
And in the case of Terrence Howard,
Marvel didn't have him in theirs.
If they continued with him, they'd
be paying a lot for a character who
had a significantly less impactful role
in the overall story of the MCU.
Replacing him was nothing more than a business decision
that saved the studio tens of millions of dollars.
Whether or not this business deal
was conducted in an ethical manner
will always be up for debate.
But we're not here to guess it.
At the end of the day, what you see on screen
are people doing a job.
As much as they're artists, they're
also employees of the studio once they sign those contracts.
What does this say about Marvel films in general
that a replacement like this was so easy for them?
Does something like this create the perception
that money becomes more valuable than performance?
I'm not sure, because I'm not entirely sure what
Jon Favreau saw in Terrence Howard's performance that
made him and the studio say this isn't working.
I guess what's important to remember
is that not everything in art is fixable,
and sometimes it's easier and maybe better to just move on.
This is it for today's episode.
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