Something occurred to me the other day…
In the popular film Iron Man II, Justin Hammer of Hammer
Industries hires Ivan Vanko, AKA Whiplash, to design and build a fleet of
killer robots for military use. Vanko sets these robots on a rampage and Iron
Man, with the help of War Machine, must stop them.
In its sequel, Iron Man III, Aldrich Killian and the
Advanced Idea Mechanics develop and then attempt to use the experimental drug
Extremis to give themselves powers sufficient to defeat Iron Man, failing to do
so when he calls in a literal fleet of semi-autonomous Iron Man Armours to fight
by his side.
Which raises the question:
Is there a vulture capitalist firm whose business model
involves buying up the remains of evil corporations that have tried and failed
to kill Iron Man for pennies on the dollar? Because while that seems VERY
specific, I feel like enough evil corporations are destroyed by Iron Man over
the course of his exploits that in spite of this it would be a fairly
successful model. After all, Hammer and Killian are imprisoned or dead by the
end of their films, but their multibillion dollar trans-national corporations,
their infrastructure, their R&D departments, all of this remains more or
less intact, and I can only imagine how their stock price must plunge, between
the sudden loss of their CEO and the fact that they’re all over the news as
“Evil Corporate Entity Du-jour Tries and Fails to Kill Iron Man!!!”
Some enterprising investor with an eye for tech firms could
easily swoop in, buy up what was left of the company that Iron Man had
destroyed and publicly humiliated, carve up the remaining infrastructure and
resources and repurpose it in ways whereby no one would realize that the
company had once been evil.
Perhaps this investor fold them into his own existing tech
company, rebranding them along the way.
What was once the Advanced Idea Mechanics becomes just
another pert of Stark Industries.
It would make a lot of sense, if you think about it.
Tony Stark lost a lot of contracts when his company stopped
developed lethal weaponry, and he’s gotta make his money where he can. And if
the destruction of his corporate rivals leaves money on the table, it’s only
natural that he’d think to pick that money up…
Iron Man suits ain’t free, after all, and he does go through
a lot of ‘em…
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