From the Omaha Film Festival, Ain’t It Cool News, and a user there named Krullboy comes our first Iron Man 3 news.
Shane Black was in attendance at the fest, and naturally Iron Man 3 came up. He reports that he is writing it (hooray!), but revealed something very odd.
According to Black, Marvel and Paramount were displeased with the direction Iron Man 2 went in. Black plans (presumably with their approval) to take it away from “two men in iron suits fighting each other” and into the realm of plausibility. He plans to tackle it as a “a Tom Clancy style thriller” and have Tony Stark face off with real world baddies.
The sort of headsmacking bit about this news is that I was under the impression that Jon Favreau always intended to keep Tony as believable as possible. When I sat with him at the SDCC roundtable for Iron Man 2, he talked about the frustrations and complications that he foresaw in bringing real world Tony against the magic of Thor and the wider world of The Avengers. Because Iron Man 2 felt like one massive Marvel set up, I thought the “two men in suits” storyline really stemmed from a way to have to shoehorn Nick Fury and Black Widow in. That’s what I felt like watching it, anyway, and that was certainly the rumor once Favreau walked.
Making Iron Man 3 a more personal and smaller story (and not the face-off with Mandarin, as was originally the plan) would certainly be the best approach post-The Avengers. You need to scale the series back, and have Tony justify putting the suit on when he isn’t part of a massive superhero directive. This is the stuff of all the solo series. Why, they could even bring back Justin Hammer, who was arguably the highlight of Iron Man 2.
Black is definitely bringing a lot of spark and strength to this project, and kudos to Paramount and Marvel for taking a step back from the precipice, and(hopefully) concentrating on character and story again. I’m only sorry it didn’t happen more on Iron Man 2 so we could have had something beyond some loose excuses to work in SHIELD.