Here is the latest trailer for Iron Man 3…we see War Machine has a more patriotic design, and we get a good look at The Mandarin…and of course lots of booms and Tony Stark out for revenge…it opens in wide release and IMAX in the U.S. on May 3rd, and internationally on April 25th.
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Here is the extended version of the Super Bowl trailer for the upcoming Iron Man 3!
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In this trailer, we see that Tony Stark faces a new supervillain, but also struggles with his own identity…Iron Man 3 comes out on May 3rd, 2013, and features returning stars Robert Downey Jr, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Don Cheadle.
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Stan Lee Media, Inc. (which isn’t really related to Stan Lee himself, since the company filed for bankruptcy back in 2001), is swinging for the fences. The company filed a $5.5 BILLION lawsuit against Disney, claiming that Disney does not actually own the rights to Stan Lee’s creations, and therefore want all the profits from the massive movie hits that Marvel, and now Disney since they acquired Marvel in 2009, plus a declaration of full control over the characters. This directly affects the Spider-Man, Iron Man and X-Men franchises, and several characters in The Avengers.

This appears to be a continuation of lawsuits that started back in 2007. SLMI claims that when the company was formed, Stan Lee assigned all rights to his characters to the company. But later on, Lee assigned the rights to Marvel, the company he originally created and published all those characters. It all hinges on what Lee actually gave to SLMI – was SLMI created to work on new properties, or to administer the old ones?

Speaking of the Man in the Iron Suit, it appears that Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr. injured his foot during a stunt on set. According to Disney:

While performing a stunt on the set of Iron Man 3, Robert Downey Jr. sustained an injury to his foot. There will be a short delay in production while he recuperates.

Nothing else is known at this point. This comes on the heels of actress Mayim Bialik (The Big Bang Theory) who suffered injuries to her hand in an automobile collision in New York City yesterday. Fortunately she tweeted yesterday (with her husband typing) that she was “in pain but will keep all my fingers,” and she was back on set today.

In this first official image from the set of Iron Man 3, you can see that Tony Stark has an increasing number of power suits…we count 7, not including parts. It will be interesting to see what each of them is best used for – other than just for style…

As the Superhero Steamroller called The Avengers rolls over everything, taking in another $55 million in it’s third weekend and burying Battleship, which may be on it’s way to become Universal’s John Carter (both of which starred Taylor Kitsch…hmmm…hope he isn’t invested in Facebook stock…), Marvel/Disney wants to ride the high and has infused the just-started Iron Man 3 with an additional $60 million in it’s budget…raising the total to $200 million, according to Latino-Review. That’s a lot of explosions and devastation…no idea exactly what they’ll spend it on, I just hope they do so wisely, and not on Tony Stark’s Scotch budget.

Jon Favreau, who brought Iron Man to the screen twice to large box offices and bringing comic-based movies back to the forefront, has told Marvel Studios he will not return for Iron Man 3. I’m sure we’ll get an official reason from one or both sides soon (and will likely step around the issue), but the street-word is that it was either the studio wanting to throw in a bunch of other Marvel heroes into the movie in the hopes of seeding more spinoffs (I thought that was what The Avengers was for?), and/or Favreau’s price tag this time around. And with Marvel now owned by Disney (they paid $4 billion for Marvel, and another $115 million to Paramount to fully own the rights to Iron Man 3 and The Avengers), Disney dislikes the idea of too many gross-based contracts skimming off their money.

Let me throw out another idea – rather than throwing in more heroes to seed more movies, Disney may want to take advantage of their ownership to seed their theme parks, which thus far have not benefited from the acquisition and thanks to Universal Orlando’s open-ended contact for a number of the major characters (Spider-Man, The Hulk, etc.), Disney would need to raise visibility of some to be able to capitalize.

Favreau will still work with Disney in the near-term, however – he’s working on the tentatively-titled Magic Kingdom project, which deals with a family trapped in the Disney park at night – where the the characters come to life.

Update: Jon Favreau confirmed the news on Twitter.

Disney’s first major benefit of acquiring Marvel may be in the distribution rights to the upcoming Marvel films The Avengers and Iron Man 3, with Paramount assigning the rights to Disney for a guaranteed minimum up front of $115 million against the distribution fees. Paramount will retain the rights on Thor and Captain America.

There is a lot of buzz about Iron Man 2 potentially beating out The Dark Knight for the opening weekend gross receipts weekend record, and it is getting a good start with $7.5 million from midnight showings on more than 2500 screens in the U.S., but it is well short of the target record of $18.5 million. Batman did have the advantage of almost 2000 more screens at the time, and Iron Man will gain around that today, so we have yet to see what the ultimate results will be.