Up until now we were left only to speculate why Terrence Howard was being replaced by Don Cheadle in IRON MAN 2. Now, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, we have some answers. Basically it was two reasons. Here’s what went down: if you can believe this, Howard was the highest paid cast member on IRON MAN. Higher than Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges (this comes in part because Howard was the first actor to sign on to the film). Now during the filming of IRON MAN, director Jon Favreau was reportedly unhappy with Howard’s performance in the film and while developing the sequel with writer Justin Theroux, they were drastically reducing the storyline for Rhodey and, theoretically War Machine. Marvel caught wind of this and weren’t thrilled about paying Howard all that money for barely any screentime so they went to his agents with a salary renegotiation that included a more than 50% paycut. His reps were obviously not thrilled. Sounds like passive aggressive negotiating as clearly his reps could not accept such a drastically reduced salary and Marvel was able to hire Don Cheadle and allow Favreau to redevelop the Rhodey/War Machine character, which is what Marvel wanted in the first place. I’d be interested now to hear what Howard and Favreau have to say about all this but neither has spoken on the record since so we’ll have to wait…
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