[Jeddostotle7]

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

My big disappointment with the bait and switch was that once he was left as the only villain Guy Pearce's performance was flat and cartoonish. Plus the overall arc between his character and Iron Man was just the plot from The Incredibles. The ending also felt dumb when it happened, "oh Tony destroys all his suits except we all know this isn't the end of Iron Man so this just feels lame."

I feel a lot of people completely missed the point of the end of IM3. He wasn't saying he was done with his armors, he was just saying "I'm not gonna continue spending literally all of my time building armors; I'm gonna spend time focusing on my loved ones, and other people I care about". Because, remember, in the less than a year between Avengers and IM3 (Avengers takes place ~the same time it came out, IM3 takes place Christmas the same year) he built 35 separate suits of armor, which was caused by (and not helping with) his obvious PTSD. In the ~4.5 years since then (we can see Tony still using the Mk. 46 in the Spider-Man: Homecoming trailer, and most MCU movies after IM2 take place at roughly the same time they come out, occasionally give or take a few months), he's only built 4 more armors, the first of which (Mk. 43) is literally just a finished and bug-tested version of the last armor he built before he blew them all up, and the second of which (Mk. 44, A.K.A Hulkbuster) is arguably just an add-on to/extension of the first.