This weekend saw the explosive debut of Iron Man 3 on the big screen so, it’s appropriate to kick off our new feature looking at the demographics of the fans of various characters with Iron Man. We have been previously running a feature at the beginning of the month looking at the demographics of the greater comic fandom. Now, every Monday, we’ll be checking out one aspect of that fandom. It might be characters or publishers, it’ll vary week to week depending on what’s occurring around that time.

This will vary a bit differently compared to the breakdown of the greater comic book fandom. Instead, this looks might include generic terms for characters, movies, video games, comic series or more. In the case of Iron Man, we included his movies, but we didn’t include The Avengers.

Facebook Iron Man Fan Population: Over 7,805,760 in the United States

That’s about 2.7 million more fans of Iron Man than comic books. Maybe these people do read comics, but don’t “like” any terms that’d tell us so. But, with April’s sales numbers released, Marvel’s Iron Man comic isn’t even in the top ten. That’s a lot of people who can be engaged and converted!

Spanish speakers is a smaller set of the population, 389,580, 4.99%. That’s lower by 0.16% from the greater comic fandom.

Gender and Age

This statistic is fascinating. The percentage of men versus women is similar to that of the generic population. Men account for 64.58% and women 35.40%, women about 3% more and men about the same amount less.

What’s interesting is the age breakdown. Below is the chart of ages and their genders for the generic comic fandom.

This is that same age breakdown, but for Iron Man fans.

The widening of the gender gap in the case of Iron Man fans is much shorter, and reverses when women become the majority of fans at the age grouping “46-49.” We’ve seen that young women are the majority of manga fans, but this is the only other instance so far where we’ve seen women being the majority of fans. Maybe Marvel should be targeting their prose books to this age group and have it feature their Iron Avenger.

We haven’t dived in to figure out where this comes from, but the majority of the population consists of fans of the first Iron Man film.

(Update) Last night in a discussion with some of our crack staff, we pondered what might be the cause of this. The answer might be simply, the star of the movie. While we can’t tell the overlap of Robert Downey Jr. fans and fans of Iron Man, we do see that his fanbase is very much women, a possible factor in the above. Only in the age segment “Under 17” are men a majority of the fans. See the graph directly below to see how the age of Robert Downey Jr. fans plays out when it comes to gender.

Here’s the full raw numbers as far as age and gender.

Relationship Status

How do fans match up with the ladies man Tony Stark? They seem to have lucked out better as compared to the generic comic population.  While single individuals are still the majority, they don’t make up the majority. Those that are engaged, “in relationships” or married have a slim majority of 51.64%.

Education

Tony Stark is an educated man, how does his fans compare? When looking at this statistic compared to generic comic fandom, we find that it’s… about the same.

Gender Interest

Remember, this doesn’t necessarily mean folks are interested in the same or opposite sex for relationships. But, in this case the same-sex interest is smaller than the generic comic fandom.