How Much Would It Cost to Buy Avengers Tower?-Latest New 2025

Spoilers follow for Thunderbolts.

You wouldn’t expect a Marvel movie to be so focused on prime New York real estate. And yet, that’s exactly what happens in Thunderbolts, where a major portion of the action takes place in and around what was formerly known as Avengers Tower – now called The Watchtower, thanks to new owner Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). While this does tie up a plot point that’s been dangling since Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) moved the Avengers out of the HQ in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, it also raises a bunch of questions. Money questions. Specifically, how much did Valentina pay Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) for the tower? And what would be involved in renovating an entire high-rise, right in the center of New York City?

To give a little more background here, and you may be aware of this: Avengers Tower does not exist in real life. Despite being home to two major battles next to Manhattan’s Grand Central Station (those would be in the first Avengers movie and Thunderbolts), the MCU building has replaced another, real-life landmark: 200 Park Avenue South, also known as the MetLife Building. In the comics, the Tower is 93 stories tall, and as seen in the movies, it’s packed with bells and whistles like a helipad that allows both Iron Man and a Quinjet to take off. It also gets attacked. A lot. The MetLife building? No Iron Man take-off platform, and also far fewer supervillain attacks.

Michael T. Cohen, a Principal with Williams Equities, which owns and invests in several million square feet of NYC real estate, has over 40 years in the real estate business – and more importantly, has been a fan of Marvel Comics and movies for years. He compared Valentina’s purchase to the offering of 590 Madison Avenue, a high-rise office building 15 blocks uptown from “Avengers Tower” that recently had an asking price of $1.1 billion.

“The metric by which we would measure the value would be price per square foot,” Cohen explained. “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.”

Other buildings in the area that have changed hands or are getting built up include a Hyatt that has been on hold for a while, though it looks to get started next year. The Chrysler Building has changed hands a number of times. And multiple buildings in the 50s and 60s (streets) – 10 to 20 blocks North of Grand Central – are getting converted into apartments, versus the towering office buildings that have dominated the area for decades.

There are a few more factors that Cohen added that would impact the asking price for Avengers Tower. The first? The rooftop helipad, which was banned in NYC in 1977. “How did the Avengers, and how did the buyer… How did these people arrange for the city to change the rules to permit a helipad back in the middle of the city again?” Cohen said. “Somebody would have had to pull some strings. There would have had to have been some interesting conversations around allowing that to happen, because right now it’s not permitted.”

As a not-so-insignificant sidebar, the 1977 ban occurred after a helicopter crashed on May 16, on top of what was then called the Pan Am Building. The horrific accident killed five people and wounded eight others, including a pedestrian who was hit by a rotor falling from the roof. In 1992, after Pan Am was dissolved, the name was changed to match the new owners, and the building was renamed as… the MetLife Building.

Kevin Draper, a New York City historian and owner of NewYorkHistoricalTours.com, explained further that there were already issues with helipads in the city due to the noise. While the Pan Am helipad was part of New York history – Draper recalled that The Beatles took off from there for their iconic Shea Stadium concert in the ‘60s – the accident in ‘77 “pushed it over the edge. That’s when people realized, ‘We can’t have this anymore.’”

So the mere existence of that part jutting out from Avengers Tower would be an issue to work out for both Tony Stark and new owner Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, since it shouldn’t exist at all. But helicopters landing is far from the only issue facing the building, home of both the Old Avengers and the New Avengers: It’s a prime target for supervillain attacks, as seen in multiple movies and TV shows.

“It would be very challenging to buy property insurance for Avengers Tower if you were a conventional investor,” Cohen continued. “The Avengers, presumably, don’t occupy the entire building. While it’s a fabulous location and it’s terribly prestigious, how would you feel about being a tenant in Avengers Tower, say, on the floor beneath them, or above them, or anywhere in the same elevator bank? Do the Avengers have a private entrance, or do they ride with the conventional tenants? If you really built Avengers Tower in the middle of the city, there are some very interesting, idiosyncratic considerations one would have to take into account.”

And one last idiosyncratic consideration? The constantly under-attack building is, just like the MetLife Building, on top of a transportation hub, aka Grand Central Station.

Draper noted that Grand Central has become even more desirable recently as “tens of thousands of people can come straight from Long Island into Grand Central Terminal, which means that’s going to do a lot … in terms of people wanting to keep their corporations and headquarters or what have you in that neighborhood… In the world of Marvel, having some sort of very important headquarters there makes perfect sense.”

The subway entrances at Grand Central are utilized in Thunderbolts when the team is ferrying innocent bystanders to safety while The Void (Lewis Pullman) is going hog wild. But in terms of a building prone to destruction, the potential liabilities both for the owner of Avengers Tower and the city of New York might outweigh the benefits.

Just to take a step even further back, what would even be involved with a massive real estate deal like buying Avengers Tower? According to Cohen, it’s a multi-step process that would involve creating an offering memorandum, which would contain reports on the maintenance of the building and infrastructure, and then inviting interested parties to sign a confidentiality agreement to check it out.

“For Avengers Tower? It would not be outlandish to have 40 or 50 investors sign the confidentiality agreement and visit the website to examine this data. But then, eventually, the seller will call for bids,” he says.

From there, the sealed bids are submitted to the seller – in this case, Tony Stark, or more likely Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow), since she handles the business side of the company. The buyers will evaluate what they think the building is worth and how they’ll gather those funds. If those buyers be worthy, they wield the power of… A second bid. That second bid will encompass a higher offer, which will continue to whittle the number of bidders down to one or two. At that point, the seller will try to “squeeze as much money from his favorite buyer as he possibly can, and hands are shaken, and papers are drawn, and whoever got left at the altar becomes, you know, Miss Congeniality waiting in the wings.”

In this case, we don’t know who Miss Congeniality was (perhaps Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer?), but we do know who won Miss America: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. She purchased the building around 2016 (when Spider-Man: Homecoming is set), but as we discover in Thunderbolts, essentially abandoned it and any planned renovations for years.

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