To the Victor Von Doom go the spoils.

It’s good to be Robert Downey Jr. these days. With a career and reputation left for dead by the mid-2000s, a role in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang helped reanimate the troubled ’80s star’s corpse back to life.

Famously, it was landing the role of Tony Stark/Iron Man for the newborn Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008 that would send him back to A-list status. It’s hard to believe it, but Iron Man was considered a signficant risk to produce at one point. Nobody had heard of the character outside of comic book fans. Then there was the star himself, Downey Jr. who was an even bigger gamble with his prior arrests, DUIs and rehab visits. Dude was a hot mess.

Iron Man was a massive hit. The MCU completely (for better or worse) took over Hollywood for the next ten years. The mega franchise culminated in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, which saw Downey Jr. finally retire Tony Stark in dramatic, sacrificial fashion.

Ever since then the MCU has been…well, shitty. It’s been bomb after bomb, basically.

Earlier this year Downey Jr. won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as conniving politician Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. You may have heard of it. It won Best Picture and made nearly a billion dollars.

Now Downey Jr. is back in the MCU. Winning Oscars is so yesterday, apparently. Why win gold when you could win green? While wearing green. Lots and lots of green going on here. Kevin Feige just hired him back into the Marvel fold to play Victor Von Doom, aka Dr. Doom, in two upcoming Avengers movies. For $100 million.

Yes, $100 million. As in one tenth of a billion dollars. That’s an obscenely silly amount of money to pay someone just for playing dress up for a few months. However, a little perspective is in order. Some justification, even. I contend Feige might have gotten Downey Jr. CHEAP for the role.

You have to remember, an A-list star is an investment in the film’s success. This goes especially so in Downey Jr.’s case. No Downey Jr, Iron Man maybe isn’t a hit. No Iron Man hit, no MCU. No MCU, no billions of dollars.

Like Jules Winnfield said, “Personality goes a long way.”

The last Avengers film, Endgame, made nearly $3 billion. Infinity War made over $2 billion. Even if the next two Avengers films make “only” $4 billion combined, that means Downey, Jr. cost a mere 2.5% of the total revenue, not including merchandise sales and other downstream effects of two hit movies, like traffic to the upcoming Marvel Infinity Kingdom at Disneyworld.

There’s also precedent for paying top talent a huge sum to help lend respectability (and most importantly, ticket sales) to a spandex flick. It all started when Richard Donner approached Marlon Brando to appear in Superman: The Movie as Supes’ dad, Jor-El. Brando agreed, but only for the princely sum of $3.7 million plus a cut of the profits. An utterly outrageous sum back then for what amounted to less than two weeks of work. But Donner needed a big star in addition to the great Gene Hackman already signed on as Lex Luthor, as newcomer Christopher Reeve wasn’t a big name at the time.

Brando got his big payday. Superman grossed $300 million at the box office, making The Godfather’s upfront cut a mere 1% of the revenue. That’s not counting video sales, merch, broadcast rights, and other income sources over the last 45 years since the film’s release. If Superman has made $1 billion thus far, then Brando’s “outrageous” sum only cost about one third of one percent of the total revenue. I’d say Warner Bros. got their money’s worth out of him.

Of course, movies with big actors bomb all the time. It’s risky fronting enough cash to fill a Brink’s truck, even to charismatic, proven stars like Downey Jr. Time will tell whether this massive paycheck will prove a good investment or not. Either way, even $100 million will look small in four decades time, just like Brando’s $3.7 million does relatively-speaking today.