Fan Digs Up Easter Egg From First ‘Iron Man’ Movie

It’s been over a decade since Iron Man took the comic book movie world in a whole new direction, but it looks like fans are still finding new details within it.

A post on the MovieDetails subreddit has been making the rounds online, which highlights a particular Easter egg hidden within Iron Man. As Reddit user HellotoHorse points out, the scene where Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) and Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) talk over pizza begins in a very particular way, with Stane playing a piano piece by the composer Antonio Salieri. This has an added layer of significance to it, as Salieri was rumored to have attempted to sabotaged kill Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – not unlike what Stane does to Tony as the film goes along.

As the top comment on the post points out, there isn’t actually a lot of truth to Salieri and Mozart’s rivalry, even as the myth has carried on for all of these years. Still, the urban legend of it all does add an extra layer to Salieri’s music being included in this Iron Man scene.

Even though the Marvel Cinematic Universe has evolved pretty massively in the years since the Iron Man, some fans still remember the original feud between Tony and Stane pretty fondly. But as it turns out, Bridges has a pretty unique memory of the whole experience, which was essentially flying by the seat of its pants in terms of script.

“[Director] Jon [Favreau] dealt with it so well,” Bridges said in an interview in 2016. “It freaked me out. I was very anxious. I like to be prepared. I like to know my lines, man, that’s my school. Very prepared. That was very irritating, and then I just made this adjustment. It happens in movies a lot where something’s rubbing against your fur and it’s not feeling right, but it’s just the way it is. You can spend a lot of energy bitching about that or you can figure out how you’re going to do it, how you’re going to play this hand you’ve been dealt. What you can control is how you perceive things and your thinking about it.”

“So I said, ‘Oh, what we’re doing here, we’re making a $200 million student film.’” Bridges continued. “We’re all just f***in’ around! We’re playin’. Oh, great!’ That took all the pressure off. ‘Oh, just jam, man, just play.’ And it turned out great!”

But one thing that Bridges apparently didn’t find great about Iron Man was the demise of his character, who was ultimately killed in a fight with Tony in the third act.

“In the original script they were supposed to open my suit after, and I was gone! But then, no,” Bridges said in an interview last year. “I read the scene we were shooting, and they said, ‘No, you’re dead.’ And I said, ‘Oh…’ Then they said, ‘Well, it’s a comic! Maybe you’ll come back!’ I don’t know.”

Fans can see Iron Man in Avengers: Infinity War, which is in theaters now.