Now we're talking synergy! It's been the holy grail of comic-based movies, having characters from one movie appear in another character's tale. While it may only be a cameo, Robert Downey reprises his role as Tony Stark for a brief scene in the forthcoming Hulk, further extending the reality of the Marvel universe. You'll find evidence of Stark's appearance in the clip below. If we can somehow get Iron Man and Spider-Man joining forces in the future, well, there will be a ton of happy fans.
This video exudes cool and sheer awesomeness. Simple as that. Sign me up for a full-length CGI movie. If the coming Avengers movie were created in this style, well, I'd be one happy Marvel fanboy.
The Reelz Channel explores the history of armored suits in movies, covering everything from the Black Knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail to Iron Man and Batman.
Amazing how a $200-million opening can kick-start the notoriously slow moving wheels in Hollywood, evidenced by yesterday's announcement that Iron Man 2 would be hitting theaters in 2010. Now the Jon Favreau, the film's director, is already talking up the sequel with Entertainment Weekly.
Will you be involved with the sequel?
We've been speaking informally about it, and in concept we would all love to work together again. But I found out about the announcement last night, so it's not something that — we would definitely love to collaborate more with the sequel. There's no formal arrangement yet, but in theory we would all love to see it happen.... There's definitely a lot of ideas that we all have now. This type of movie is based on serialized materials, so it lends itself very easily to [many different sequel possibilities]. There's definitely a level of enthusiasm from myself and the cast to tell more stories.
Is Robert Downey Jr. under contract to do another movie?
Cinema Blend is reporting that Sgt. Fury has a a brief cameo in the new Iron man movie, but you'll have to wait for the end credits to wrap before you'll see an eye-patch wearing Samuel Jackson chomping on a thick cigar.
Jackson, was supposed to show up as the comic character Nick Fury, an eyepatched, hardass agent of a secret government organization known as SHEILD. Well there may be more than one reason it was reported missing in those early prints of the film.
It will however definitely be on every print in theaters this weekend when the film is officially released. So if you want to see what Sam Jackson looks like with an eye-patch, make sure you stick around until after the Key Grips get their due.
Industrial Light & Magic has a track-record of upping the ante for the visual effects community, never content to rest on their laurels in a never-ending quest to splash the screen with the best visual tricks possible. Their latest effort, Iron Man, appears to continue that evolution, something covered in a good C|Net article that goes inside the Lucas empire.
But it all comes back to Iron Man's suit--a technical marvel that allows him to fly, shoot missiles, be impervious to many conventional forms of attack, and more. To watch video from the film, you see that the suit has no end of little flaps and compartments that all seem to operate independently and which are all essential to giving the Iron Man character his fully teched-out superhero flavor.
The problem was, according to ILM visual effects supervisor Ben Snow, that the traditional options for creating a suit like Iron Man's--either making it fully CGI or making it a fully real-life, physical, or "practical," suit--weren't going to work for this film.
"The suit has to do a lot more than just a suit of armor can do," Snow said when I visited ILM recently.
You've no doubt seen the previews for the upcoming Iron Man movie and thought Tony Stark's suit is pretty freaking awesome, but what's the likelihood of such armor ever being available in the real world? Pretty high, actually, though I wouldn't expect flight capability any time soon.
Live Science is spotlighting two suits is particular, the Sarcos XOS exoskeleton and the HAL exoskeleton from Japan. Of the two, the HAL is closest to production and sports an awesome list of features:
Japan's HAL exoskeleton is not only an impressive device, but will soon go into production for sale. Cyberdyne Inc will produce 500 HAL suits each year, starting in October of 2008.
The fifteen kilogram battery-powered suit detects muscle movements through electrical signal flows on the skin surface. These currents are picked up by the sensors and sent to the computer, which translates the nerve signals into signals of its own for controlling electric motors at the hips and knees of the exoskeleton, effectively amplifying muscle strength. HAL stands for "hybrid assistive limb"; HAL-5 is the latest version of the suit.
Yes, Terminator fans, the makers of HAL is called Cyberdyne.
The extended trailer for the upcoming Iron Man movie starring Robert Downey Jr. aired during Lost last night. This movie looks frickin awesome, but they've fooled me before (Spiderman 3, Hulk). In either case, it at least looks like we'll get our fill of a smart-ass billionare strapping on a massive piece of expensive weaponry and blowing stuff up. That's worth my ten bucks.
