Tony Stark's Cheeseburger

Submission 18,906

Part of a series on Avengers: Endgame. [View Related Entries]

Editor's Note: This entry contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame; read at your own caution.

About

Tony Stark's Cheeseburger refers to a series of jokes, memes and reactions about a series of references to cheeseburgers in the Marvel superhero films Iron Man and Avengers: Endgame. Following the release of the latter, many online expressed their sadness upon being reminded of Tony Stark's first cheeseburger in the 2008 film Iron Man.

Origin

On May 2nd, 2008, the film Iron Man was released in the United States.^[1] In the film, after Tony Stark (portrayed by Robert Downey Jr.) escapes imprisonment, he demands a cheeseburger before speaking to the press about his experience (clip below).

11 years later, in the film Avengers: Endgame, the character Happy asks Stark's daughter Morgan (portrayed by John Favreau and Alexandra Rachael Rabe, respectively) what she would like for lunch. She answers, "Cheeseburgers." He responds, "Your dad liked cheeseburgers too. I'll get you all the cheeseburgers you want."^[2]

Spread

Following the premiere of Avengers: Endgame on April 24th, 2019, fans of the movie began tweeting their reaction to the callback, which many believe to be bittersweet. For example, that day, Twitter user @amonstergd tweeted a video of a person holding a McDonald's cheeseburger with somber music playing over the soundtrack. They captioned the video, "spoilers without context". The post received more than 16,000 retweets, 69,000 and 1.4 million views.

spoilers without context #AvengersEndGame pic.twitter.com/EeE0Mocipj

— adrianna (@amonstergd) April 24, 2019

On April 27th, Twitter ^[3] user @winterxcevans tweeted an image of Lisa Simpson crying in response to the mentions of cheeseburgers in the film. The post received more than 2,800 retweets and 10,000 likes in less than two weeks (shown below, left). Twitter^[4] user @BonokuS posted an image of Peter Parker (portrayed by Tobey MacGuire) crying in the film Spider-Man in response to an offer for a cheeseburger. The post received more than 800 retweets and 3,000 likes in less than two weeks (shown below, center).

Over the next few weeks, others continued to share jokes and memes referencing cheeseburgers in the films (example below, right).

Several media outlets wrote about the cheeseburger references, including USA Today,^[5] ComicBook.com,^[6] PopBuzz^[7] and more.