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What a huge hat to shove onto someone's head.
That equipment division director was just one step away from saying it outright—telling Tony Stark to get his ass back to the company and use that brilliant yet unreliable brain of his to give their products a major upgrade.
And that, in fact, was the biggest problem Tony Stark had been facing lately.
In order to prop up the transformed Stark Industries and maintain investor and consumer confidence and loyalty, Tony had indeed achieved tangible results in the commercialization of many products across various fields.
Even if they didn't lead entire generations, Stark-made products were consistently superior to competitors' offerings in the same fields. That was the old Stark Industries reputation shining through.
In this regard, Tony Stark could absolutely stand shoulder to shoulder with his father, Howard Stark. Father and son were both unquestionable geniuses—and both deeply understood how to harvest reputation and profit simultaneously in the commercial world.
The difference was that Howard Stark was interested in almost everything and did almost everything, while Tony Stark focused narrowly on the core of military industry projects. He had zero interest in household juicers or automatic pencil sharpeners for students.
Modern Stark Industries wasn't exclusively in weapons, of course. Plenty of peripheral equipment could be adapted for civilian use. It was just that weapons projects remained the most important—and the most profitable.
Still, there was no denying it: Tony Stark was like a walking philosopher's stone. Anything he touched not only outperformed competing products in efficiency and quality, but also carried a distinctive design language that somehow attracted fervent fans.
Especially that red-and-gold color scheme—pure flamboyant red mixed with nouveau-riche gold. It wasn't something that only exploded in popularity during the Iron Man era. It was already there at this stage.
If military weapons didn't require a certain degree of camouflage, Stark Industries might have rolled out red-and-gold Apocalypse tanks or gaudy golden sniper rifles—just to make sure the enemy could see them clearly.
Everyone bullied him because he was young—
—and it was only then that Henry suddenly realized something shocking: his Earth age was exactly the same as Tony Stark's. Both born in 1970.
Thankfully, their registered birthdays were different… otherwise that coincidence would have been unbearably awkward.
—everyone wanted to fleece that genius brain, squeezing free labor out of him.
Henry, of course, had no intention of supporting that kind of thinking. At least within the film domain entrusted to him, he had no intention of actively asking Tony Stark for help.
The main reason was simple: he had no face to do so.
Those people were all old retainers left over from Howard Stark's era. They could pull seniority and bully Tony as a junior generation family member.
If Henry dared say the same thing, Tony Stark—with his venomous tongue fully activated—would shred him to pieces.
That said, exploiting Stark Industries' resources wasn't impossible. It just required finesse.
For example, if Stark Industries already had mature products in a given field, there was no need for Stark Pictures to develop competing tech and have the family fighting itself. In that case, Stark Industries providing some technical support would be entirely reasonable.
Besides, Henry had parachuted directly into Stark Pictures. Hidden motives aside, on the surface he still needed to produce results. Otherwise, was he really going to be a white-collar parasite collecting a paycheck while doing nothing?
If that were the goal, he might as well have become a consultant—consult without consulting, pocket the fee, and be done with it. There'd be no need to sit in the CEO's chair.
So once Henry decided to take over Stark Pictures, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.
It wasn't about churning out a few low-budget blockbusters, nor about pouring every resource into Charlize Theron to brute-force a Best Actress trophy.
Where he could truly make his mark was by leveraging his super-brain and his knowledge of future trends from before transmigration—specifically, advancing film technology and equipment, with a focus on digitization.
Film stock technology had essentially reached its peak.
Beyond 35mm film, there already existed superior 65mm film technology—commonly known as IMAX.
This system, first developed by the Canadian IMAX Corporation starting in the 1970s, encompassed filming, transfer, and projection. To achieve optimal results, even theaters themselves had to meet strict specifications.
Why hadn't this system—with its higher resolution, brightness, contrast, and full color gamut—replaced the 35mm standard?
The biggest reason was cost. The replacement expense was astronomical and simply couldn't be widely accepted by the market.
If Henry pursued that path, he'd only be following behind others—watching them eat the meat while he sipped soup. That wasn't his style. IMAX had already proven that the 35mm ecosystem was far harder to replace than expected.
As for digital storage in cameras, that too had existed for a long time. Japanese companies—Sony in particular—had already claimed much of that territory, using magnetic tape.
That was why many television programs had abandoned film stock in favor of tape, which was far more convenient. Entire production pipelines—from pre-production to post—had been built around those systems.
Those were already developed, mature fields.
What Henry wanted was something else.
He wanted to ride the wave of computer-driven digitization, and in one leap push image encoding and decoding to a level approaching 35mm film quality—roughly 4K UHD.
His own equipment was already at 1080p HD. Bringing it to Stark Pictures and pushing it one step further shouldn't be too difficult.
Granted, it was only early 1995.
Consumer PCs were powered mainly by Intel's Pentium CPUs, running at 75–100 MHz.
This was before distinctions like entry-level, consumer, and server-grade processors existed. High-end commercial machines simply installed two CPUs to boost performance.
Even so, that level of computing power was still insufficient for full digital film production—especially for post-production tasks like editing, color grading, and CGI rendering.
But if one waited until computing power reached a sufficient level, that would also mean the barrier to entry had dropped. Anyone with ambition could jump in.
By the time the technology was "mature," the market would likely already be saturated.
At that point—what role would there still be for a Kryptonian like him?
The whole point was to predict the future ahead of everyone else, stockpile technology early, and then set the standards.
Only then would Henry feel that stepping into this game was truly worthwhile.
They said:
Third-rate companies sell products.
Second-rate companies sell design.
First-rate companies set standards.
But being first-rate wasn't just about inventing something new or publishing a specification.
The real key was forcing everyone to follow your standard—with zero legal disputes—so that anyone who wanted to use it had no choice but to pay.
Only truly first-rate enterprises had that kind of power.
Henry wanted to see whether Stark Pictures, backed by Stark Industries, could pull that off.
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For 20 advanced chapters, visit my Patreon:
Patreon - Twilight_scribe1
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