Shane Black. “Iron Man 3.” Since the first moment those two names were connected, the question has been, “Will he write the film?”
And now, according to Ain’t It Cool, we have an answer.
Shane Black appeared this weekend at the Omaha Film Festival, along with some other guests like Tom Elkins, Mauro Fiore, and Ted Griffin, and one of the people who was in the audience wrote in to AICN to talk about what Black revealed regarding “Iron Man 3.”
Here’s the paraphrased version of what they ran:
Shane Black is about to meet with Robert Downey Jr. this week in Los Angeles. They’ll be discussing the story and Black will, indeed, be writing the film.
Marvel Studios wants to make sure this third film isn’t just a retread of the first two. They want to make sure this next film doesn’t just end up as another film about “two men in iron suits fighting each other,” and I agree. I think that’s a great impulse. Tony Stark’s had a long history in print, and for the first two films to be so similar in shape is probably a mistake. If they’re serious about taking the film in a Tom Clancy-like direction, with Iron Man fighting real-world villains, it’s a cool direction to take the series. It sounds like after “The Avengers,” Marvel’s focusing on making movies that stand alone again, which is also a very strong impulse.
Meanwhile, over at It’s On The Grid, they’ve got a list of open writing assignments at Disney, and they’ve added “The Inhumans” to the projects they have in development. If you don’t know the comic, it’s one of the more cosmic-minded Marvel movies, big and weird, dealing with superbeings who live on the moon, the long-abandoned creations of the Kree aliens.
As Devin Faraci pointed out, that’s not exactly the film that It’s On The Grid described, though, which makes me think that there will be some major revisions to the book in an effort to get it to the screen. Between this and “Doctor Strange,” it sounds like we’re in for the much weirder side of Marvel in the next few years, and that sounds great to me.
In the meantime, I’m thrilled to hear about “Iron Man 3” and the direction it’s heading, and I can’t wait to see what Black’s up to.