[Warning: This article contains Thunderbolts* spoilers.] “I mean, the place wasn’t cheap,” Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) says of the Watchtower in Thunderbolts*. “But it has good optics.” That’s because the Watchtower* is really *New Avengers Tower, formerly Stark Tower, which billionaire Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) converted into Avengers Tower in 2012’s The Avengers. The building sold to a mystery buyer in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, but it’s not until Thunderbolts* that we learn Val — a.k.a. Contessa de Fontaine, a.k.a. CIA Director de Fontaine — used her resources to acquire the former Avengers headquarters.
But just how expensive was Avengers Tower? According to New York City real estate vet Michael T. Cohen, a Principal with Williams Equities, the building would easily fetch over a billion dollars.
“The metric by which we would measure the value would be price per square foot,” Cohen told IGN of the MCU’s version of the real-life MetLife Building located atop Grand Central Station at 200 Park Avenue South. “So my guess is, there’s nowhere where they safely tell you whether it’s a million square feet, or a million and a half, or how large it really is… So we’re kind of shooting in the dark here, without any of the underlying math, but I would say one could easily assume that the Avengers Tower would sell for a billion dollars or more based upon the look of it, the size, and the location.”
Cohen compared the fictional Avengers Tower to a listing at 590 Madison Avenue, which TheRealDeal.com reported to be “NYC’s most expensive office deal in years”: a price of $1.1 billion, or more than most Marvel Studios movies have grossed at the box office. (To compare, 2016’s Captain America: Civil War earned $1.15 billion at the global box office; or enough to purchase one Avengers Tower.)
Only Iron Man 3 ($1.21 billion), Deadpool & Wolverine ($1.33 billion), Black Panther ($1.34 billion), Avengers: Age of Ultron ($1.4 billion), The Avengers ($1.5 billion), Spider-Man: No Way Home ($1.92 billion) earned more, with the worldwide totals of Avengers: Infinity War ($2 billion) and Avengers: Endgame ($2.79 billion) dwarfing the $1 billion-plus price tag of a comparable building.
Stark Tower’s uppermost floors featured an Iron Man landing pad, Tony Stark’s lavish living quarters, a helipad, laboratories, and the Arc Reactor-powered building included a level for Stark Industries. In Thunderbolts*, the building was in mid-renovation when work on de Fontaine’s Sentry Program was put on hold; it was only 70% completed when she was forced to prematurely introduce Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman) as the Watchtower’s resident superhero, The Sentry.
Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts* — a.k.a. The New Avengers, which stars Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Hannah John-Kamen, Lewis Pullman, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus — is now playing only in theaters.
[Warning: This article contains Thunderbolts* spoilers.] “I mean, the place wasn’t cheap,” Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) says of the Watchtower in Thunderbolts*. “But it has good optics.” That’s because the Watchtower* is really *New Avengers Tower, formerly Stark Tower, which billionaire Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) converted into Avengers Tower in 2012’s The Read More