As the Marvel-verse expands, so too does the frequent speculation about what movies will come next, which characters will return and how they’ll be incorporated. But undoubtedly, the highest paid actor in Hollywood, Robert Downey Jr., can be credited with much of the comic studio’s success. Frankly, if it weren’t for "Iron Man" not only being successful, but become a major franchise in its own right, Marvel likely wouldn’t be where they are today. But still, he’s coy about whether or not "Iron Man 4" will happen.
“It’s down to Kevin [Feige, Marvel Studios president] and Ike [Perlmutter, CEO of Marvel Entertainment] and Disney to come to us with what the proposal is, and that’s on us to agree or disagree,” Downey told EW. “When things are going great, there’s a lot of agreement.” Basically, it sounds like RDJ still wants to be courted and treated like the star attraction he is, and why not? He’s been central to Marvel throughout their first two Phases, and so it behooves them to play nice.
As for Feige, he’s done a lot of talking in the lead up to "Guardians Of The Galaxy," and while there’s not much about "Iron Man 4," there’s plenty of other stuff to discuss. So let’s start with "Namor: The Submariner," once rumored as a Universal property that they were going to turn into an upcoming event movie. Turns out, that’s not happening — or at least, things are complicated. "Let’s put it this way – there are entanglements that make it less easy," he told IGN. "There are older contracts that still involve other parties that mean we need to work things out before we move forward on it. As opposed to an Iron Man or any of the Avengers or any of the other Marvel characters where we could just put them in."
Speaking of characters with complicated rights, there’s Quicksilver who appeared, played by Evan Peters, in Fox‘s "X-Men: Days Of Future Past" and who will also play a central role in Joss Whedon‘s "The Avengers: Age Of Ultron" (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson). And Feige explained how they’ll differ. "We are very much playing up two things that [‘Days of Future Past’ doesn’t] play with: one is his relationship with his twin sister, Wanda; the other is, his backstory as an Eastern European child of a war-torn country, and we follow him throughout the whole movie — him and Wanda — as it relates to their feelings about the Avengers and how that shifts and changes over the course of the movie," he said. "So it’s a very different thing than coming out from one, unbelievably awesome showcase sequence of the movie, and much more interwoven throughout the entire movie." Take that, Bryan Singer.
Lastly, Feige commented on two villains — Red Skull and Mandarin — who may or may not return. As for the former, Feige effectively said he’s dead, and he’s not sure how the character would come back in the fold (it doesn’t help that Hugo Weaving hated the entire experience). As for the latter, the door is much more wide open. "There have been [talks]," he teased. "That’s one of the reasons we wanted to do the fun short that Drew Pearce wrote and directed. That was to clarify, ‘Hey, just because we did this thing doesn’t mean this other thing doesn’t exist.’ And as we were making ‘Iron Man 3‘ — and I think Drew’s spoken about this — that was always our intention, was that Aldrich Killian was perverting the notion of these things he’s heard."
Thoughts? You know where to leave ’em….
