Steve Jobs Called Disney CEO Bob Iger To Tell Him 'Iron Man 2' Sucked

Another day, another interesting tidbit coming out of Disney CEO Bob Iger's recently released book, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company.

So far, we've heard about Iger's meeting with Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, Michael Arndt, and George Lucas in which the Star Wars creator was disappointed that his ideas weren't being used for the new trilogy. We also found out that Disney almost got into the Marvel movie business before their acquisition of Marvel Studios in 2009. Funnily enough, the acquisition of Marvel went through with an assist from Apple CEO and Disney shareholder Steve Jobs, but that didn't stop Jobs from calling Iger to tear into one of the Marvel Studios movies he had just seen in theaters. Find out more below.

In Bob Iger's book, the Disney CEO recalls (via ScreenRant):

"When Iron Man 2 came out, Steve [Jobs] took his son to see it and called me the next day. 'I took Reed to see Iron Man 2 last night,' he said. 'It sucked.'"

That might seem mean-spirited of Steve Jobs just to call Bob Iger to tell him that Iron Man 2 sucked, no matter how accurate that criticism may be. But during this time, Jobs was a board member at Disney and their largest shareholder. So whenever any big business decision came around, Jobs was consulted by Iger. And that included the acquisition of Marvel Studios in 2009.

While talking about his book, Bob Iger talked to Vanity Fair about Steve Jobs' involvement in the Marvel deal:

"In 2009, after our very successful acquisition of Pixar, we were interested in acquiring Marvel, so I met with Steve and walked him through the business. He claimed to have never read a comic book in his life ('I hate them more than I hate video games,' he told me), so I brought an encyclopedia of Marvel characters with me to explain the universe to him and show him what we would be buying. He spent about 10 seconds looking at it, then pushed it aside and said, 'Is this one important to you? Do you really want it? Is it another Pixar?'"

Iron Man 2 hit theaters a little less than a year after Disney picked up Marvel Studios. That means Disney wasn't involved with the development of the sequel, which was distributed by Paramount Pictures at the time. But Jobs seems to have gone out of his way to bash the movie as a way of expressing that he didn't have much faith in his decision to buy Marvel Studios. Thankfully, he would be proven wrong in the coming years, and Marvel is now Disney's most successful acquisition to date, at least as far as the box office is concerned.

No matter how much of a forward thinker Jobs was, it's clear that he didn't necessarily have the right vision for the potential of superheroes on the big screen. He might have been right about Iron Man 2, but he's wrong about comic books in general.