Not a huge update here, but pretty much anything related to Marvel's upcoming film slate is worth discussing. Former L.A. Times Hero Complex writer Geoff Boucher has taken his talents over to Entertainment Weekly and started a new blog called Cape Town over there, and one of his first big "gets" is a long five-part interview with Robert Downey Jr.
Today, Boucher released the second installment of the interview and spoke with Downey about the likelihood of us seeing any other members of The Avengers pop up in this summer's Iron Man 3. Here's what he had to say:
Iron Man 3 picks up not long after the alien invasion of New York where Tony Stark went into battle at the side of a thunder god, a living legend from WWII and a giant green man-monster. Will we see any of those Avengers in this movie? Or does this movie need to be Tony’s Me Party?
Robert Downey Jr.: The whole Avengers thing [with $1.5 billion in global box office] was such a relief and such a confirmation of [Marvel Studios President] Kevin Feige’s vision for this all along. As Kevin has put it, the next step after that is to bring in someone like Shane Black and – without pretending that the Avengers don’t exist – find a way to go back to a kind of re-investigation of Tony’s world, which he thought would be, one, fun for the audience and, two, would rock in a different way than The Avengers. But we can’t help it — everywhere you look now in every Marvel movie there are opportunities where certain new pals of his could be useful. So they’re in the atmosphere, so to speak, but I wouldn’t expect to see them on the ground in this one.
We all know how cagey Downey can be when it comes to speaking about this sort of thing - he famously told reporters at The Avengers press conference that the cast still had one more scene to shoot that very night (which ended up being the schwarma post-credits bit) - so I'm wondering if he's speaking literally here. We might not see any of The Avengers "on the ground," but might they show up on some sort of communication screen, or assist in the action from a plane overhead? It's totally possible, and it's obvious that Marvel is planning on using the post-credits sequence for Iron Man 3 to rev up anticipation for more Phase 2 projects, just like they did with Phase 1.
So what do you think, Tyrants? Will we actually see some of The Avengers in Iron Man 3, or is Downey shooting us straight on this one? Don't forget to check out the full interview over the next couple of days at Cape Town.