Talks revealed last week have turned to final negotiations as Marvel has found their replacement for Jon Favreau for “Iron Man 3.”
Deadline reports that Shane Black is in final negotiations to take on the directing gig for the lucrative franchise. Black is a solid choice for the director’s chair, a genre veteran behind a string of ’80s and ’90s action films including “Lethal Weapon,” “The Last Boy Scout” and “The Long Kiss Goodnight.” More recently, he made a splash by writing and directing “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (which served as a comeback vehicle for Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr.).
We’re definitely excited by this choice but for us, the make or break of this thing not just being a mess of Marvel Easter Eggs for “The Avengers 3” (or whatever) will be if Black is able to write the script. “That’s not figured out,” a source told Deadline but we certainly hope it’s in the cards. While both ‘Iron Man’ films were box office hits, Marvel could learn something from the diminished returns of the second one by not trying to link every gestating comic book film to “Iron Man 3” and just letting Tony Stark do his thing.
No word yet if Black will squeeze in one of the other projects he’s been recently attached to — a live action adaptation of the manga “Death Note” and an adaptation of radio serial “Doc Savage” — before he gets crackin’ on “Iron Man 3,” but he does have some time. The film isn’t set to hit theaters until May 3, 2013.
I\’d be pretty surprised if they didn\’t hire him on as the writer, since that\’s what Shane Black is for. He got the camera-holding gig for \”Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang\” so that they could use his script without having to shell out his previous squillion-dollar fee.
And they\’ve already established the Tony Stark character as a motormouth type (breaking from the source comic books, I might add), which is the kind of character that made Black who he is (Mel Gibson in \”Lethal Weapon,\” Downey Jr. in \”Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,\” everybody on the screen in \”The Last Boy Scout\”).
\”There were some problems with IM2 but I didn’t think one of them was the Avengers tie ins.\”
Well it was somewhere down on my list of problems.
If it had taken you out of an interesting film narrative it would have been worse, but I cared so little about anything else that was taking place on screen, I didn\’t care that much.
bottom line is it simply wasn\’t very good, interesting, or much of anything else. It was kind of embarrassingly bad.
The problem is a lot of \”writers\” tend to write what they read or hear somewhere else rather than form their own original opinion. There were some problems with IM2 but I didn\’t think one of them was the Avengers tie ins.
I think people should stop perpetuating the myth that \”Iron Man 2\” was nothing but a trailer for the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Nick Fury didn\’t show up until more than an hour in, and his purpose was more to get Tony off of his ass and create the element that would save him than to recruit him to \”The Avengers\”. Captain America\’s shield appears, but that\’s a throwaway gag. Coulson is mentioned as going to the southwest to investigate what turns out tobe Thor, but that would make more sense than just him vanishing without a trace (as would be the case in most action movies).
I doubt anybody could mention four unnecessary references to the rest of the MCU that had no connections to the story of \”Iron Man 2\”.