I'm surprised nobody has said it but Iron Man/Tony Stark. This is a little unfair, I guess, because there was no MCU before Iron Man, but when I first heard they were making an Iron Man movie my reaction was "Ok, why?"

I mean, growing up in the 90's, I fucking loved Spider-Man. He was the only hero I would collect new issues of. Still, I inherited a backlog of older comics from a family member and read through a lot of them. You know who I always thought was lame? Iron Man.

Younger and more casual audiences might not remember but Iron Man was not a popular superhero before 2008. Like, solidly B tier at best. I heard about the Iron Man movie in 2007 and even as someone who loves superheros and saw pretty much every super hero movie in theaters, hearing about an Iron Man movie just did not move the needle for me. (And for those that don't remember, 2007 was a rough year for Superhero movies. Spider-Man 3, Ghost Rider with Nicolas Cage, FF2 and Underdog collectively underwhelmed and we were all talking about superhero fatigue even back then.)

Then the first trailer teaser trailer dropped for Iron Man and it was just like god damn, I went from not caring at all and thinking why are they even bothering with this character to being an Iron Man/RDJ Stan in two minutes.

So Iron Man fits the bill for me. I expected the movie to be just another forgettable popcorn flick along the lines of FF1/2 or Ghost Rider and instead we got an absolutely amazing character, actor and movie that launched what would become the biggest and most ambitious movie universe ever.