That MCU/DCEU crossover is coming for us all. It seems like an insane idea right now, but flash forward to 2035 where, in the wake of a disastrous box office performance for Rocket Racer 2: The Return of Big Wheel, Marvel is going to have some serious soul searching to do. And an event level Batman v. Iron Man movie is going to wind up looking like the best way to recapture those 2018 glory days. There’ll be logistics and legal mumbo jumbo to work out, but there’ll also be a lot of money to be made, so the studios will find a way.
Batman going toe to toe with Iron Man on the big screen is a long way off, but we have excellent news; you can get a little preview of what that confrontation might look like with this collection of memes. And it’s surprisingly easy to imagine - Batman and Iron Man are in many ways opposite sides of the same coin, they were both born into wealth but it’s easy to imagine how their personalities would clash. Maybe they’d have a playful rivalry, maybe the conflict between them would be more serious, and either way there’s already lot of fanart. Many of these were found on DeviantArt and if you like what you see there’s plenty more where that came from, so be sure to check all of these artists out! With that in mind, here are 25 Hilarious Batman vs. Iron Man Memes.
Gadgets
“Where does he get those wonderful toys?” There were generations of moviegoers who assumed that Alfred was the one designing all the Bat-Gadgets. But 2005’s Batman Begins brought Lucius Fox to the big screen and suddenly the idea of Batman became a lot more logical to audiences. Not that we doubt Batman’s technical expertise - he was able to fix the Batwing autopilot just in time for the climax of The Dark Knight Rises, but there just aren’t enough hours in a day for him to personally manufacture every single batarang. Knowing he has a secret R&D department at work for him makes a lot of sense.
Tony Stark on the other hand is a true Renaissance Man, we all saw what he was able to do in a cave with a box of scraps, after all. Which makes the idea of him cribbing off of Batman’s work in the above fanart even funnier. There’s no need for him to rip off the Batwing design, he seems to be cheating just for the sport of it. Batman, despite being drawn in the style of Frank Miller’s fearsome interpretation of the character in The Dark Knight Returns, appears helpless to do anything about it.
In what will become a recurring theme in many of these memes, Spider-Man is in the background, quietly keeping his head down like a kid whose parents are arguing again.
Casting
Even though there are those of us who recall Robert Hays with a certain fondness, as far as audiences are concerned there’s only been one Iron Man. Iron Man is synonymous with Tony Stark, and Tony Stark is synonymous with Robert Downey Jr. The whole Marvel Cinematic Universe arguably wouldn’t have gotten off the ground if not for that single instance of perfect casting.
So with that in mind, we think Iron Man is being a bit passive aggressive in this piece of fanart. Sure, he’s acting like a supportive friend, trying to keep Batman’s spirits up in the wake of 2013’s controversial casting of Ben Affleck. But what better way to twist the knife than to remind him of all the many miscast Batmen we’ve seen over the years?
George Clooney couldn’t pull it off, but the star of Jersey Girl and Surviving Christmas is going to do just fine, Iron Man seems to be implying.
The drawing is from 2013 and it’s prescient enough to raise the spectre of a Ben Affleck directed Batman movie. There are many who feel Affleck fared well in the role even if they had problems with Batman v. Superman and Justice League, but the idea of him pulling double duty behind the camera is very exciting as well. We’re still pretty bummed it’s not happening.
Breakout Year
Technically the superhero movie craze has been happening since the start of the millennium, it just took them a while to get organized. If we may, we direct your attention to 2007’s crop of comic book films; Spider-Man 3, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and Ghost Rider. Yeah. Hard to imagine, but back in 2008, The Avengers was still just a gleam in Kevin Feige’s eye and based on the Marvel movies that had come out one year earlier, audiences didn’t have much reason to expect Iron Man to be anything special.
X-Men had fans, Spider-Man 1 and 2 had fans, we’re going to meet the guy who liked Hulk any day now, but Batman Begins at that point was the most “respectable” comic book film of the 21st century. We could use it as a means to symbolically take Iron Man down a peg. This meme has been floating around the Internet for several years now and while we can’t trace it all the way back to 2008, it wouldn’t surprise us to discover that some huge Batman fan was taking a shot at Iron Man without knowing what he would lead to. Probably all in good fun, though the image has been re-appropriated as a bit of “Take that” at the MCU.
Fears
Each of the three Christopher Nolan movies were built around a central theme and all three gave Batman a villain to fight who was the embodiment of that theme. Bane was the embodiment of despair in The Dark Knight Rises. The Joker was the embodiment of madness in The Dark Knight. And of course, Scarecrow, under the control of the League of Shadows, was the embodiment of fear in Batman Begins. From beginning to end, Batman Begins was an exploration of fear as much as it was an origin story. Bruce used what he was most afraid of to become Batman and the League literally tried to weaponize fear against the general population.
Iron Man 3 didn’t try for as much depth, but it did give us a Tony Stark who was dealing with post traumatic stress disorder after the invasion of New York. The glimpse he had of what was out there beyond our planet continued to resonate into Age of Ultron and Civil War, as he became obsessed with building more powerful weapons in order to ensure that Earth would never again be caught off guard. And given what Thanos was able to do in Infinity War, it seems as though his worst fears have finally come to pass.
The artist’s idea that Iron Man fears portals to an alien world while Batman is scared of fruit bats might be a little flippant, but it rings hilariously true.
Crossover Movies
It did seem as though DC was eager to get its own big superhero crossover off the ground, but they may have jumped the gun. Justice League’s entire worldwide gross was exceeded by the opening week box office of Infinity War. And the thing of it is, it didn’t need to be that way. A few more successful solo films like Wonder Woman and audiences would have flocked to Justice League.
Batman emerged from JL unscathed, as Batman is known to do. But what if he got fed up with the DCEU and tried to join The Avengers?
We love this little piece of fanart, as the child versions of The Avengers are absolutely in keeping with the characters we’ve gotten to know over the course of these many movies. Especially note Hawkeye’s suction cup bow and arrow, Black Widow as the token tomboy who’s a bit apart from all the boys, and Iron Man splayed out as the mischievous alpha male of the club. If he spoke, he’d sound like T.J. from Recess. Their personalities just leap out of the picture, and we would watch that show.
The Kid Avengers are probably right not to let Batman into their treehouse. They’re a less tortured group and how much fun would they really have with Batman around?
Plotholes
The third act of The Avengers set a new benchmark for superhero movie mayhem. Fans returned to the theatre over and over to see Hulk swing Loki around like a rag doll or Iron Man’s full body enema takedown of the Chitauri, or Hawkeye’s… we’re just kidding no one was there for Hawkeye. But the more viewings we went to, the more we had to gently bat away some small gaps in logic. The assault on New York City could have been prevented before it even got started and, in this meme, Bruce is on hand to point out a particularly simple solution. True, Stellan Skarsgård was on the roof with the Tesseract, but if you want to prevent an alien invasion you have to break a few of Stellan Skarsgård’s bones. Eggs, we meant to say.
However, Stark could turn it around and ask Batman why after he rescued Rachel he didn’t just grapple back up to that fundraiser The Joker crashed and nab him. Or why no one in Gotham City puts it together that Batman also disappears any time Bruce Wayne leaves town or becomes a hermit.
We’re not saying turn your brains off, but superhero movies attract a small subset of fans who would rather be pedantic than let themselves get immersed in an experience. If you spot a plothole on your fourth viewing, that doesn’t invalidate the three times you enjoyed the movie before. It just means there’s some skillful storytelling at work that prevented you from seeing it before.
Privilege
The key difference between Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark is that Stark actually was the playboy that Bruce Wayne was pretending to be in The Dark Knight Trilogy. They were both born in positions of extreme privilege and wealth. Both had idealized, sheltered lives growing up, before they were forcibly pushed outside their bubble and got a brutal taste of the world as it actually is. Both dealt with their pain in unhealthy ways.
Bruce was orphaned as a child, while Tony lost his parents when he was a young adult. Bruce appears to have internalized his grief and as an adult was driven to dress up as Batman and go out to fight crime as a means of therapy. Tony submerged his grief and lived a reckless, carefree life until he got kidnapped and saw the impact Stark Industries was really having. So he decided to use his wealth to try and positively impact the world.
Two different billionaires with somewhat similar early lives, both fighting for different, but equally compelling reasons. But at the end of the day, it’s still nice having a lot of money, so it’s nice to see that, according to the image above, they don’t take it for granted.
Vs. Movies
This is the first and last time in this article that we’re going to come to the defense of Zach Snyder’s Batman v. Superman, so here goes - too much was made out of the “Martha” moment. Without having seen the movie, you’d assume Batman and Superman literally decided to become friends after finding out their mother had the same name. But there was a solid enough in-story reason for Superman to bring up Martha (though him saying “My mother…” would have made more sense), hearing it gave Batman pause for a moment, and the two stopped fighting long enough to realize the bigger story.
And if you can tell us what that story was, you’re a few steps ahead of us. Jesse Eisenberg was in there, so something to do with Facebook, maybe. Wait, he was playing Lex Luthor? That can’t be right…
Bruce and Tony didn’t fight head to head, but if you look at these movies as a proxy battle, it’s another victory for Iron Man.
Civil War, released in theatres soon after BvS, fared a lot better critically. It had just as many characters, but the groundwork had been laid a lot more carefully. We knew who almost all of the heroes were and there was a great deal more emotional investment when we saw all of them clash dramatically in the third act. Snyder knows how to bring an interesting aesthetic to his films, but the storytelling in Civil War was a lot more skillful.
Shared Competition
There’s something bittersweet about aging icons who start to become eclipsed by a new generation. T’Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther, has been around since 1966. However, MCU-only audiences first met him in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, then saw him explode onto the landscape in this year’s Black Panther. Batman and Iron Man have years of iconography and that’s hard to beat, but there’s something impressive about seeing the flashy new kid command an audience right out of the gate. Moreover, you can’t really say that Batman or Iron Man have ever appeared in a film that could be classified as a cultural phenomenon in the way that Black Panther was.
As pointed out in the image above, Black Panther’s vibranium suit is suited to both stealth and combat. Plus any team with Letitia Wright’s Shuri on it has an automatic advantage. Wakanda has taken steps towards sharing their technology with the world and Tony is likely to take full advantage of it, but he’s got a learning curve ahead of him. T’Challa has been using vibranium all his life.
Of course, everyone who saw Infinity War knows that Tony Stark has one very distinct advantage over T’Challa right now. But we’ll see where things stand this time next year…
Music Video Parodies
Maybe we’ve been trying to generate conflict where conflict doesn’t exist. Who’s to say that Batman and Iron Man would fight? Just because they’re two big personalities, it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be friends. For all we know, they’d get along like Kanye and Jay-Z in “Otis.” This possibility has already occurred to artist Marco d’Alfonso over at DeviantArt, who’s created a shot-for-shot recreation of the Spike Jonze directed music video.
Jay-Z and Kayne West are long time friends and their 2011 collaboration was met with huge critical acclaim. Sadly, some tension exists between them right now, but Jay-Z maintains that there is genuine love between the two men and indeed their friendship, as well as the easy way they play off each other and trade verses back and forth in “Otis,” is evident for the world to see.
Whatever sort of first impression Batman and Iron Man would make on each other, maybe they’d quickly put it aside if they shared some sort of common, Jesse Eisenberg type enemy (we’re still having trouble with that one). We don’t expect them to appear in a music video together, but thanks to Marco’s excellent drawing, we have no trouble imagining it.
Shared Cast Members
In the summer of 2008, Iron Man and The Dark Knight were the two seminal films that kicked off our current era of comic book films. If you were a character actor that year you had two goals; keep it on the D.L. if you appeared in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and see if you could book parts in one or both of the year’s biggest superhero movies.
Joshua Harto played a nondescript role called “CAOC Analyst” in Iron Man, but showed up in the far more substantial part of Coleman Reese in The Dark Knight. This guy was deducing Batman’s secret identity when Joseph Gordon Levitt was still in diapers and when he threatened to reveal it on TV, he wound up in The Joker’s crosshairs. If someone doesn’t end Coleman Reese in one hour, I’ll blow up a hospital, promised The Joker.
Coleman Reese was the Ryan Chappelle of the Nolanverse, and his open ending combined with him knowing Bruce’s secret intrigued the fans. We noted his name. Coleman Reese. Mister Reese. Mysteries? Mysteries like riddles? As it turned out, The Dark Knight was the last we saw of the character, and Harto had to settle for reprising CAOC Analyst in Iron Man 3 five years later.
Secret Identities
Tony Stark is kind of a bigger threat to the notion of a superhero than any supervillain ever could be, as he risks giving the whole game away. So many superheroes assume they need to have secret identities in order to protect their loved ones or to avoid getting in trouble with the law because they’re technically being vigilantes. Blah blah blah. Tony Stark just runs around fighting crime and everyone knows who he is. He doesn’t hide in a cave, he lives in a building with his name on it. Come at me, bro.
A hero keeping his identity secret is a nice way to whip up some easy Jiffy Pop character conflict by having him constantly keep secrets from the people he cares about.
Really, how different would Bruce’s life really be if everyone knew he was Batman? He’s outed in the epilogue of 2015’s Arkham Knight and pretty much everyone is like “Keep on being you, Bruce.” Tony Stark blows the lid off of the whole Batman mythos and reveals that Batman is probably just antisocial more than anything. Being put in jail for wanton property damage worries Bruce a lot less than being asked by random strangers to show up for their kid’s birthday party.
Senses of Humor
Of all the memes on this list, this might be the one that most gets at the heart of who Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark are. No matter the incarnation, Bruce is a dour guy. He’s got one liners sometimes, but he’s not really intentionally funny ever. Even in the most overtly comedic screen interpretation of Batman, the 1960s Adam West show, Batman himself was never funny. He was comically serious in the face of all the madness around him.
Tony Stark is funny. That’s one reason why he made an impression as a character at a time when Christopher Nolan’s ultra serious Batman was seen as the benchmark for superheroes - he didn’t try to compete in the same playground. He doesn’t take much too seriously, which is most evident in the first Avengers movie. Tony Stark doesn’t have to carry much of the dramatic weight in that movie, he’s just the team smart aleck and the movie is better for it.
That might be why we like this meme, we can imagine this exact exchange happening if the characters met for real. Tony is flippant, Batman injects some earnestness into the conversation, and Tony undercuts him so fast Batman’s head would spin. Or at least turn from side to side, finally.
Money Fight
If you come to a Zeppelin concert, you expect to hear “Stairway to Heaven.” If you come to a compilation of Batman vs. Iron Man memes, we’ve got to show you the Money Fight. It’s an oldie but a goodie, as this is a meme we’ve seen around for quite a few years, and it’s still liable to get a laugh for its sheer, unvarnished cruelty.
For all that we’ve been talking about their character flaws, Batman and Iron Man are fundamentally heroic people.
Oftentimes, superhero and supervillain origin stories are impossible to distinguish, and we can certainly imagine Bruce and Tony redirecting their anger towards the world at large and using their resources to really do some harm. But they continue to do good, which makes the idea of them having a money fight fundamentally entertaining - it’s so out of character it’s hilarious.
Spider-Man is of course caught in the middle. Look at the sadness in his eyes. Is he upset that it’s come to this for two of his heroes? Or is he disgusted with what he’s been reduced to? Either way, he’s caught between two flagship superheroes and he has money raining down upon him. Cheer up, Spider-Man. This is the American dream.
Looks
There’s always someone better. Bruce and Tony have got money, they’ve got all the technology in the world, and they’re eligible bachelors. But for whatever reason, they’ve committed to hiding their good looks behind a couple of masks. Thor is a beautiful man, he knows it, Natalie Portman knows it, and the rest of the world knows it too.
Thor is also arguably the strongest hero to ever come out of Marvel or DC. In the first Avengers film, he even clocks in the least amount of screentime among all the non-Hawkeye superheroes. He doesn’t make his first appearance until the movie is already forty minutes old and drops out of the action for a while in the middle after the attack on S.H.I.E.L.D. Could it be that his presence is too comforting? We don’t worry as much about Loki or alien invaders with him around.
Not only that, the word Thursday literally means Thor’s Day in Old English. We’re not going to get a Batday or an Ironday any time soon. And Thor 2 wasn’t great, but it was still a lot better than Batman and Robin.
Batman and Iron Man might be a little bit outgunned, in every sense of the word, on this one.
Brains
You can name quite a few real life, very high profile examples of people who were born into obscenely wealthy families and still turned out to be very, very dense. And that’s why you have to give it to Tony and Bruce. For all their advantages, for all their money, they’ve earned their place in the world.
No less an authority than we here at Screen Rant have already take a look at the intelligence of these two superheroes. Bruce Wayne is an expert in a wide range of subjects and there’s seriously nothing more satisfying than becoming Batman in Rocksteady’s Arkham trilogy, going into Detective Mode and hearing him say things like “There’s a chemical compound in this residue that can only be found in a single orange grove over in southern Florida” (Paraphrasing). We ranked him the third most intelligent superhero, Iron Man had to make due with seventh place.
However, Tony often calls himself a futurist. He can’t see into every potential alternate reality like Dr. Strange, but he can anticipate and solve problems before they’ve even happened. So he actually probably would have an advantage in a chess game with Batman, but we’d like to see their battle of wits play out in other venues as well.
Understudies
Iron Man and Batman are the loftiest ideals for every child fantasizing about being a superhero. They are what you could be if only you had unlimited money and unlimited access to tomorrow’s technology. Spider-Man is something that seems attainable. Who’s to say that science won’t advance far enough to turn you into a superhero? Who’s to say that you won’t become smart enough to figure how to whip up your own batch of web fluid, so long as you stay in school and study hard?
Spider-Man: Homecoming was one of the most creatively successful superhero films in years, not only because it captured the feeling of Spider-Man being an ordinary ground level superhero, but because it placed him in a universe already populated by massive larger than life figures such as Iron Man. Although he had something to aspire to and he wanted to please Tony Stark, his day-to-day concerns were easy to relate to.
If Iron Man has Spider-Man, we suppose Batman has Robin, and even that’s not nearly the same. It sucks that Robin’s parents passed, but at least he’s got resources.
This meme is a bite sized encapsulation of everything we just brought up. Iron Man and Batman have all the toys and money in the world. Spider-Man has to make due, but he’s kicking ass all the same.
Overhead Costs
Let’s get into the weeds a little bit. The folks over at MoneySuperMarket.com have broken down the actual cost of being Batman and Iron Man, and if you’ve got superhero ambitions, this infographic is going to bring you crashing down to Earth.
It would take obscene wealth to become Iron Man. You don’t really think about the four jetpacks in his costume and a nuclear power source in his chest until you see a breakdown this clean. The $110 million dollar cost of a single suit is over half the budget of Iron Man 3 in its entirety, and that movie is essentially just a story about Tony Stark trying and failing to get into a long series of Iron Man suits. It’s one to have one suit, but what about all those duplicates?
On the other hand, in direct comparison, becoming Batman seems like a perfectly attainable goal. Especially if you make your own cape and decide that maybe you can live without the Custom Graphite Cowl. But then, almost as an aside, we find out that Batman’s vehicles (which we assume encompasses the Tumbler, the Batwing, and the Batboat) together cost $80 million dollars. Maybe you could leave those out, but what would a Batman story be without any bat-vehicles?
It’d be 2011’s Game of the Year Arkham City. Point taken. Keep that dream alive!
Predecessors
It’s fun to go back to your childhood and discover strange parallels between old and new fandoms. Darkwing Duck never particularly came across as a parody of Batman specifically, but he lived in a kind of mock heroic version of the same playground the Caped Crusader was occupying at the time.
Something that never occurred to us is whether Darkwing Duck’s frenemy Gizmoduck was a send-up of Iron Man? The similarity must have occurred to the writers and the animators at some point, but Iron Man wasn’t quite the commodity that Batman was in the early 90s. We’d already had the two Tim Burton films, and Batman: TAS was redefining what we thought a superhero cartoon could be. Iron Man and Gizmoduck may just be a coincidence.
Iron Man comes out on top surprisingly often in the memes we’ve gathered up, but seeing echoes of Batman in an early 90s show like Darkwing Duck does remind us that he may be winning the war. He’s been in the public consciousness for a very long time and you can’t take that away from him.
But here’s the real takeaway from this meme, the 90s was a fantastic time for animated superhero shows. Batman: The Animated Series was great. Darkwing Duck was great. Spider-Man: The Animated Series was… another show that we watched.
Grammar
For the grammar obsessives among us, keeping track of superhero names is a nightmare. Batman is already a word, so that one’s easy. Iron Man is very clearly enunciated. But why did they put a hyphen in Spider-Man? Who has the time to remember hyphens?!
This is something that has not escaped the attention of an artist with the nom de plume of CuttingRoom over at DeviantArt. As he puts it:
“I’m not sure why different heroes do it differently. Is Batman more bat than Spider-Man is spider? By making Iron Man two words, is Tony Stark trying to put distance between his machine and his humanity? Who knows? I do know that I love super heroes, and I love grammar. So that’s something.“
CuttingRoom has managed to channel this madness in a healthy direction, and has given the world this wonderful piece of fanart. This is technically a Spider-Man vs. Batman meme, but even though Iron Man is supposedly the impartial referee here, you can tell that Tony is itching to wade into those grammar wars. These three heroes had better be careful, if their fight gets too violent they might wind up in the hospital with all sorts of broken participles and dangling modifiers.
