Summers are now incomplete without at least one superhero movie, and Marvel is hoping Shell-head is as popular as Web-head. They’ve already slotted their upcoming Iron Man movie into the May 2nd weekend in 2008, the exact same spot Spider-Man 3 will swinging next year.

There are still financing complications and the recent exit of Marvel madman and movie honcho Avi Arad to contend with, but the comic house (Variety doesn’t state if the project remains at Paramount) is still planning to ignite the supersuit’s bootjets on that weekend, officially launching 2008’s summer season. The movie hasn’t actually been greenlit yet, so the open casting call that just appeared on Craigslist is probably naught.

Jon Favreau (Elf, Zathura, Swingers, etc.) is the guy in charge of fitting playboy weaponeer Tony Stark for his high-tech red-and-gold threads, and two writing teams are currently chipping at different scripts (this is supposedly what they did with X-Men 3, setting Zak Penn and Simon Kinberg to work on two entirely separate drafts and then merging them into… whatever they ended up with).