The Marvel Cinematic Universe started with Iron Man, and 10 years later, he still gets all the glory. Somebody recently did an analysis of the four Marvel "team-up" movies, The Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, and Avengers: Infinity War, and found that, in all four cases the Avenger that has the most lines is Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark.
It's perhaps not too shocking that Iron Man has more lines than anybody else in The Avengers. Iron Man was by far the most popular character and Captain America, as important as he is, had only been introduced in the previous Marvel movie, making him the new kid on the block under the circumstances. Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal was incredibly popular, he was the one Avenger who already had two movies under his belt when the team-up occurred, so it's no shock he had the spotlight.
Over time, however, the other Avengers certainly began to come into their own though, and so you'd think that maybe by the time of Avengers: Age of Ultron things might have evened out. Instead, the difference between the number of lines for Iron Man and Captain America stays about the same. And let's not even talk about the rest of the team. They all have a lot fewer lines than the big two. Hawkeye faires better in Ultron thanks to the introduction of his family, but he's the only one who sees significant improvement from the first movie to the second.
What's the most shocking about this data compiled on Reddit, however, is that even in a movie called Captain America: Civil War, Iron Man has more lines than Cap. It's a lot closer than the previous two Avengers movies, but still, Iron Man comes out on top in a movie named for Captain America. Who exactly is Chris Evans agent?
And then, of course, there's Avengers: Infinity War. There are a lot of characters to balance there so it's no shock that most characters don't have as many lines in total as they have in the other films, though Thor ends up with more lines than any previous outing. Still, who has far and away more lines than any of the other Avengers. That's right, good old Iron Man.
And we can probably guess how things will go when we get to Avengers 4. All of the core Avengers are still alive, so each of them will have plenty of lines, but with this expected to be Robert Downey Jr.'s final performance as Iron Man, you can bet that Marvel Studios is going to want to get their money's worth out of the actor.
