Terrence Howard, Jon Favreau, and R

Terrence Howard, Jon Favreau, and Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man.

Howard told Vulture about his departure from the franchise after playing Col. Jim Rhodes in only the first Iron Man movie: "It turns out that the person that I helped become Iron Man, when it was time to re-up for the second one, took the money that was supposed to go to me and pushed me out."

When pressed on reportedly wanting to make the same money on the sequel as Downey did, Howard explained without naming names that he'd done a three-picture deal with set pay raises for each subsequent sequel. "They came to me with the second and said 'look, we will pay you one-eighth of what we contractually had for you, because we think the second one will be successful with or without you,'" he recalled. "And I called my friend, that I helped get the first job, and he didn't call me back for three months."

Asked how things are now between himself and Downey, Howard said, "Oh, I love him. God's going to bless him.