In the first Avengers film, Tony Stark built a tower for his company, Stark Industries, in Midtown Manhattan that was fueled by an autonomous arc reactor. The arc reactor kept the Tower running for a year without costing the city any money. Loki chose the tower as the ideal site to use the Tesseract and establish a wormhole in order to bring his army to Earth because of the tower’s special sustainability power. The higher levels of the tower were destroyed in the Battle of New York,, along with the bulk of the “STARK” emblem — the only thing remaining was the “A” — that decorated one side of the tower. Later, it is revealed that Stark and Pepper Potts have ideas for modifying Stark Tower, which includes a helipad and sleeping rooms for the newly formed group of heroes, effectively becoming Avengers Tower.
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Subsequent films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) show Avengers Tower. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a repaired image of the Tower is briefly seen, which includes an aircraft hangar and the Avengers “A” logo. The Tower serves as the Avengers’ primary headquarters in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and has a lounge area, three laboratories, a machine room, a gym, a leisure space, and a locker room. Ultron is developed there, by Tony and Bruce, while working on an updated Iron Man project. Steve Rogers invites Sam Wilson to a celebration that the Avengers are throwing in the tower where Ultron turns out to be a villain and assaults the Avengers. Wanda Maximoff, who later becomes The Scarlet Witch, and her brother Pietro Maximoff join the Avengers who head back to the Tower, where the android Vision is built using Jarvis’ data and Thor’s lightning. The Avengers leave the Tower at the end of the movie and relocate to the Avengers Compound in Upstate New York. So, the question is: what happened to the Avengers Tower?
Glimpses of Avengers Tower in MCU Films
Marvel Studios
Avengers Tower can be seen in many of the films in the MCU. The tower can be seen twice in Captain America: Civil War, once when Thasseus Ross is showing the Avengers footage of the Battle of New York, and again when Tony Stark goes to recruit Peter Parker/Spider-Man. In Doctor Strange, we can see the Tower in a wide shot before Stephen Strange’s car accident and again during his battle in the Mirror Dimension. Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) is inside the Avengers Tower in a scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming where items from the tower are being loaded onto a cargo plane, so the tower can be sold. We very briefly get a glimpse of the tower in Avengers: Infinity War as the Q-Ship is arriving. The Tower is more heavily featured in Avengers: Endgame, when the Avengers themselves go back in time to retrieve the Infinity Stones, and Steve Rogers fights his past self within the tower. And lastly in Spider-Man: Far From Home, a redesigned version of the tower is in a scene where it has a terrace, so Spider-Man has access.
MCU Lore: Avengers Tower’s Future
The Marvel Comics series Dark Avengers #1, explains that Norman Osborn takes over S.H.I.E.L.D. and renames it H.A.M.M.E.R., also taking over the Tower in the process. When Osborn is removed from power, the Tower eventually makes its way back into the Avengers’ hands and is used as their base. Avengers Vol. 5 #35 explains that, after the Avengers were reabsorbed into the new S.H.I.E.L.D., the law enforcement organization took over the tower and made it the Golgotha station, although it was still owned by Tony Stark. Not long after that, two universes collided, and the tower was destroyed by a ship from the Children of Tomorrow (Avengers Vol. 5 #44). Eventually, Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic fixed reality, and the tower was restored. By Avengers Vol. 6 #0, Stark, however, is lacking in proper funding and unable to maintain the building any longer, so he sold it to Qeng Enterprises, whose president Mr. Gryphon ends up being a variant of Kang the Conqueror. Once Gryphon is defeated, the Tower’s status is unknown.
At this time within the MCU, which is mostly following the comic book lore, the status of Avengers Tower is mostly unknown. Questions have arisen with the distinction in the comic books versus the MCU. Fans speculated that the MCU was going to follow the Oscorp/Norman Osborn storyline, but with the rebuilt tower being featured in Spider-Man: Far From Home, that theory has been debunked. ComicBook.com asked Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige why Osborn was not included in the film, and he had this to say: “It did not occur to us to do a new Goblin story, or to do an Oscorp story, or to do Doc Ock, or anyone that had been done before, which is why Vulture and Mysterio were really the key characters.” Another fan theory gained traction after Marvel’s series Hawkeye premiered on Disney+, per Forbes, which proposes that Wilson Fisk/Kingpin is the new owner of Avengers Tower, using evidence of Clint Barton/Hawkeye specifically mentioning that the Tower was sold. Fans are just going to have to wait and see if future films, including the upcoming Avengers: The Kang Dynasty or Avengers: Secret Wars, both scheduled for release in 2025, can answer the question of what happened with Avengers Tower.
