Iron Man 2

The cost of chapter three's ending arrives here as a bill. Tony went public with his secret at the close of the first film, and this one is entirely about what a superhero identity looks like once it's a headline instead of a secret: a Senate hearing demanding the suit as government property, a rival contractor building his own version out of resentment and stolen blueprints, and the very element keeping Tony alive slowly poisoning him from the inside — the thing that saved his life in the cave turning out to have a bill of its own.

Structurally this is the messiest chapter of the opening run — a legacy subplot about Tony's father, a semi-disastrous birthday party, a public expo that becomes a battlefield — and that messiness is honest to the moment: this is a man discovering that surviving the emergency was the easy part, and staying a person afterward is the actual work. The scale is smaller than what's coming, but the question it asks — what do you owe the world once it knows what you can do — is one this saga keeps returning to.