What Marvel did with its movie franchise is no easy feat.
I mean, who knew that you could actually put a machine gun-wielding talking racoon in a movie and earn both critical and financial acclaim.
But the current place of Marvel in cinematic history wouldn’t exist without the success of the film that started it all, featuring everyone’s favorite genius billionaire playboy philanthropist.
The 2008 film Iron Man kickstarted the whole cinematic universe showcasing the iron Avenger’s origin and spawned two sequels.
Graphic designer Fede Ponce provided a new glimpse on what could have been the look and feel of the movie based on his rejected logos for Iron Man. Ponce has since created several logos for Marvel Studios including Iron Man and Thor: The Dark World.
In an interview from pre-production art blog site Film Sketchr, Ponce described how it was like working with Marvel and the process behind the creation of the Iron Man logo.
“We go through a lot of iterations and concepts when designing,” said Fede Ponce. “For this particular case, I had read the script and was able to grasp what the director wanted to talk about in this movie. The movie in essence is about redemption, about being broken and being re-born. So the main title had all those elements in it.”
Some of the logo concepts below admittedly don’t work. Some are derivative of previous superhero movies and others just straight out fail. It’s probably the metal textures and the gradients. We have to consider though that the film came out in 2008.
Check out the rejected Iron Man logos below:
And here’s the final Iron Man logo for comparison:
Did the final Iron Man logo stand out from the rest? Comment below!