I watched the last half an hour or so of Iron Man 3, for the first time since having seen Age of Ultron.
It occurs to me that BOTH movies might make more sense if you consider the events in Age of Ultron to have preceded Iron Man 3. Or, at least, it answers a lot of “yeahbuthowcome” questions…
Why, in Iron Man 3, don’t any of the other Avengers come help Iron Man out? Well while Avengers 1 ends with everybody being more or less on the same page, AOU ends with them beginning to set out on different paths. Plus, remember while he’s the BigDamnHero after Avengers, after Avengers: AOU he’s pissed most of them off.
Why does AOU center around Tony building a system that can defend when the Avengers can’t — and yet make NO mention whatsoever of the Iron Legion protocol and the semi-autonomous suits? Is it because he tried Ultron first and the Iron Legion suits under Jarvis’s control is 2.0 (or really 3.0 considering whatever the hell Vision was supposed to be). Why else would you have Iron Man 3 have a built-in destruct upon command option while Ultron doesn’t?
Iron Man 3 ends with Tony basically retiring from being Iron Man. Yet there is zilch reference to this in AOU.
True, Iron Man 3 is seen as Tony being burnt out “after New York”. But whether AOU happens before or after Iron Man 3, it’s still “after New York”.
It works much better with Age of Ultron after IM3. To address your points:
In IM3, he doesn’t call others for help because he spends most of the movie out of communication. The only time he could have called for help was at the beginning, before it was clear that he needed to.
I’m not sure why you say that the Iron Legion wasn’t mentioned in AoU, since that name (in the movies at least) comes from AoU. The opening sequence has him trying to use the Legion for crowd management (not very well, but he’s trying), and Ultron’s first bodies were Legionaires.
The retirement seems simple enough to me. At the end of IM3, he individually retires, and stops looking for trouble on his own. But his friends still need him. He’s going along with them as long as they need him, but at the same time he’s trying to arrange things so they won’t. That’s the impetus behind Ultron: He wants to retire completely, but can’t yet.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of problems with the reverse chronology:
In IM3, he’s still using the JARVIS interface, not the FRIDAY one he switched to in AoU.
His grief issues in IM3 are based entirely on New York, not on any of the events in AoU, even though AoU should have been far more traumatic for him: In New York, he was merely unable to fully stop the catastrophe, while in AoU, he actually caused it.
As of the end of AoU, Rhody is an Avenger. In IM3, he’s not.
Also, keep in mind that when Stark retired at the end of Iron Man 3, he did so confident in the belief that SHIELD was capable of keeping the world safe. SHIELD’s falling apart in Winter Soldier was likely a big part of his decision to go back into business; the world needs new protectors, and the Avengers need a new base of operations and someone to bankroll their activities.
Agree with the above… I do think it is harder to make the destruction of the suits at the end of IM3 and the use of the Iron Legion in AoU jibe. Did Tony see the specialized suits as problematic because they are wearable by anyone and were vulnerable and the Iron Legion being robots controlled by an umbrella program was deemed safer?
He didn’t destroy the suits because they were a problem - he destroyed them as part of his promise/intent to retire and be with Potts - who nearly died because of them, etc.
Extremis from Iron Man 3 was a plot point in Agents of SHIELD during the first season - before the events of Captain America: the Winter Soldier. So that part of the timeline is pretty set in MU continuity.
It just seems a much more logical progression of events…
Tony is a hero after Manhattan. (end of Av) Tony is a team guy (start of AOU) Tony puts the world at risk by creating Ultron so he doesn’t have to go on being a hero. Everybody goes their separate ways. Tony is kinda the goat. (end of AOU).
(start of IM3) The Avengers are taking a break/disbanded/each doing their own thing. That’s why Tony’s on his own. And Manhattan AND almost having ruined everything weighs on him. Having learned his lesson from Ultron going haywire, he makes the auxiliary Iron Man suits subservient and semi-autonomous but that he still has the self-destruct codes to. He ends it all by destroying all the suits, getting the core thingy removed and tossing it into the sea. He’s retiring, he’s out of the game. (end of IM3)