5 Years Before The Avengers, RDJ & Mark Ruffalo Teamed Up In One of the 21st Century’s Best Crime Thrillers

Years before they would go on to share the screen in The Avengers, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. paired up for a very different, darker sort of movie. From Chris Evans and Zoe Saldana appearing in 2010’s DC Comics movie The Losers to Evans romancing Scarlett Johansson’s character in 2007’s The Nanny Diaries, the MCU’s main players had a lot of onscreen crossover before they started playing their most famous roles.

However, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.’s biggest crossover before the MCU remains a surprising one. The duo appeared in one of director David Fincher’s best movies, the 2006 true crime drama Zodiac, five years before they played the Hulk and Iron Man in 2012’s The Avengers. Based on the hunt for the real-life Zodiac Killer, Zodiac is a chilling, intense crime thriller that follows Jae Gyllenhaal’s obsessed cartoonist Robert Graysmith, Ruffalo’s Inspector Dave Toschi, and Downey Jr.’s journalist Paul Avery as their attempts to track down the killer converge.

Zodiac Is One of The Best Crime Thrillers Since 2000

While Fincher’s earlier serial killer thriller Se7en inspired dozens of copycats, Zodiac was arguably an even darker crime drama since the movie’s story was based on real events. Grossing only $84.7 million on a budget of over $65 million, Zodiac was far from Fincher’s most profitable movie. However, the thriller was well received by critics upon its original release and has since gone on to be seen as one of the director’s best movies alongside Se7en, Fight Club, and The Social Network.

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With an astounding ensemble cast that includes Brian Cox, John Carroll Lynch, Philip Baker Hall, and Donal Logue, among many others, Zodiac is a uniquely chilling true crime story. Essentially a blend of the classic serial killer procedural format and the paranoid ’70s true crime drama stylings of All the President’s Men, Zodiac is almost unbearably tense, and this is owed in large part to the engaging central turns from Downey Jr. and Ruffalo, alongside Gyllenhaal.

Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo’s Zodiac Performances Could Not Be More Different From Their MCU Roles

Rewatching Zodiac two decades later, it is hard to believe that Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man would go on to become one of the most iconic blockbuster characters of the 21st century. The actor is unrecognisable in the role of Avery, much like Ruffalo’s exhausted cop, Toschi, could not be less like his incarnation of Bruce Banner from The Avengers movies. It is a testament to the pair’s versatility that a viewer who knows them only from the later superhero team-up may well be unable to recognise the actors in this intense, immersive true crime drama.

While both Downey Jr. and Ruffalo are great, their performances aren’t the only thing that makes Zodiac worth a watch. Fincher’s movie takes the true story of the eponymous killer’s reign of terror, complete with its frustratingly open-ended conclusion, and turns this true story into a thrilling, tragic, and obsessively compelling nightmare. Viewers are left wishing that the story could come to a more definitive conclusion, only for Zodiac to end in a place that feels as terrifying and uncertain as it is fitting and inevitable.