The Jon Favreau Win Button
The Director’s Protagonists Share A Common Signature Weapon
Jon Favreau is one of the most popular directors today. The mind behind some of the biggest films and television of the last twenty years, his movies often feature large-scale action spectacle. Even the most creative auteurs have certain tropes that they tend to favor and reuse, and Favreau’s action set pieces often end with a certain type of signature special weapon being deployed. Perhaps the best illustration of this go-to weapon is featured prominently early in the first season of his latest hit, the Star Wars gunslinger series The Mandalorian.
One of the highlights of the first season of Mandalorian were the whistling birds, first mentioned in the debut episode and seen in action in the third, and periodically throughout the show thereafter. The traditional Mandalorian weapons are a last-ditch line of defense for warriors in tight spots — they seem to consist of a brace of heat-seeking, rocket-propelled Beskar steel darts, capable of firing from a wrist-mounted device and taking out multiple enemies at once, Yondu-style. In gamer parlance, they are an epic “win button,” and instantly became one of the coolest weapons in the Star Wars universe. Fans of Favreau’s other movies, however, might not be able to shake the feeling that they’ve seen them somewhere before…
In 2008’s Iron Man, Tony Stark has the same win button. When Tony goes to Gulmira, Afghanistan to confront the terrorists who imprisoned him and are now using his weapons to devastate the region, the audience is treated to an epic fight scene with our first real look at the fully-formed Iron Man in action. The Mark III armor can fly, has super-strength, and can fire repulsor blasts, but the real win button doesn’t come out until a group of outmatched terrorists grabs several civilians to use as human shields: with no clear shot and faced with the need to act fast, Tony powers down his repulsors and, in one of the MCU’s earliest cheer-worthy moments, deploys a shoulder-mounted clip of tiny missiles that target the individual hostiles and drop them all before they can fire.
Sound familiar?
Yep: Iron Man has whistling birds. In fact, the Jericho Missile — the military superweapon that kicks off the action that leads to Tony Stark becoming Iron Man in the first place — is also a variation on the Favreau Win Button, a hypersonic missile that splits into a hail of smaller projectiles once airborn. Like Din Djarin, Tony Stark clearly knows that the only thing cooler than one shot, one kill is one shot, multiple kills. Jon Favreau knows this, too — in fact, a version of his win button can even be found in one of the director’s earlier, very different movies.
In 2003’s Elf, the eponymous Buddy and his newfound brother Michael are waylaid by a gang of kids armed with snowballs as they walk home through Central Park. In the classic scene that follows, Buddy turns out not only to be able to make several dozen snowballs in a matter of seconds, but also to throw them as though they are being fired from a machine gun, and with deadly accuracy. Here, in a lighthearted Christmas movie far different from either Iron Man or The Mandalorian, we see an early variation on Favreau’s signature win button. Sure, it’s not a perfect example — Buddy may be able to throw snowballs like missiles, but he still has to do so one-at-a-time — but the effect is basically the same. Just like the Mandalorian and Iron Man, Buddy the Elf has a deadly trick up his sleeve and solos the entire enemy army.
Jon Favreau clearly knows what he likes: it’s obvious that he has a penchant for triumphant set pieces in which the hero, his back against the wall, pulls out a final-word weapon capable of firing once and putting down a room full of enemies (or park full of kids). This isn’t to say his work is one-note — not at all. He simply found a device that works well as a satisfying crescendo to action sequences and has gotten good use out of it, and to very satisfying effect. The scenes described above all have the type of energy that makes viewers want to stand up and cheer for the hero, be it Mando, Tony, or Buddy. After all, what’s more satisfying than seeing the bad guys all fall at once?
