People Noticed an Easy-to-Miss Detail Later in the MCU Calling Back to ‘Iron Man’

The technological brilliance of Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to fascinate fans, even if no one in reality can really compete at that level. 

MCU fans often scope out little details in the past Iron Man movies where Stark managed to do things almost beyond belief. Some might say technologies he created were beyond the scope of any human. Only a being with supreme intelligence could logically create a few things he did.

Recently, fans on social media found a little movie detail nobody noticed before. It relates to the arc reactor others struggled to evolve.

What was the arc reactor in the MCU movies?

One of the things about Stark Industries somewhat crossing over into reality is nanotechnology. Many engineers and scientists in the real world have talked about and developed real nanotech being used now.

Even Robert Downey Jr. managed to go meta by teaming up with scientists to create nanobots designed to clean our world’s oceans. When everyone heard about that, some thought Downey would turn into a real Tony Stark, if only coming up with the fundamentals and not the engineering prowess.

In the MCU, Tony Stark was also into creating nano gadgets going beyond what the real world has. Maybe everyone will have the technologies he developed in the next decade. It was the arc reactor managing to go to this scale eventually, if taking some time.

For those who forgot what the arc reactor was, it was a power source co-created by Tony Stark’s dad (Howard Stark), mimicking the same powers as the Tesseract.

Fans noticed Tony Stark created an arc reactor to fit in his watch

Remembering back to 2008’s Iron Man, fans might remember when Stark Industries partner, Obadiah Stane, complained about how he was unable to reduce the arc reactor to fit his suit armor. It offered a bit of reality in how challenging it is to harness a piece of technology with tremendous power into a smaller scale.

A year later, a smaller version was created, albeit not on the nano level desired. The challenge was to make the reactor small enough to fit into something as small as a watch.

Sure enough, Tony Stark seemed to manage it. What makes this interesting is it was never announced in the movies. Only a keen-eyed fan scoped out the reactor in Stark’s watch eight years later in 2016’s Civil War.

On Reddit, someone posted a screenshot from the film showing Stark’s watch with what appears to be the arc reactor on the watch’s face.

Did Tony Stark master other technologies hidden in all the films?

Seeing a revolutionary technology Stark mastered in a scene without explanation proves how sharp the MCU creators are to details. How many other scenes might exist showing tech Stark created without any mention on-screen?

Fans might find a lot more later as viewers continue to scope out things while rewatching the films in COVID-19 quarantine. What they find would be worth looking at since it might even guess what kind of technologies the real world could see on the horizon.

You can usually find lists of real technologies being developed now everyone saw first in the Iron Man movies. For instance, the use of Stark’s exoskeleton to help paralyzed people be able to move normally is already being developed through a company called Esko Bionics.

Everyone should keep their eyes glued to the MCU movies for possible technological Easter eggs placed into each film, maybe viewable for no more than a few seconds.