Actor Robert Downey, Jr and director Jon Favreau recently told the Hero Complex Film Festival that making the third Iron Man installment will be tricky.
Why?
Because in the wake of The Avengers assembling next summer, finding the right stand-alone story-line for Iron Man will be key.
“I guess in comics you can say that it’s an individual storyline and you can break it off into a group,” said Favreau. “But in movies, it’s hard not to take into consideration what just happened. What are you gonna say? ‘They all just lost their cell phones and you can’t get help?’ So it’s going to take a lot of ingenuity to make it make sense to a mainstream film audience as well as a comic book audience.”
Downey Jr went on to state that Favreau will still help with the storyline for Iron Man 3.
“There’s going to be this kind of conglomerate of efforts,” he said.
Downey also opened up about shooting The Avengers, revealing his enthusiasm for the ensemble cast.
“I just thought, ‘How are you gonna put all of us clowns together? He’s wearing a suit, he’s all jacked up, he’s so and so and poor Mark Ruffalo, he’s gonna out do us’. And we’re about six weeks in and I have to say Joss Whedon is nailing it,” Downey Jr said. “He’s so smart and so good. And it’s gonna be great. I can’t believe I just said it, I never could’ve believed this but it’s gonna be great.”
It was already weird enough that Iron Man didn't show up in Thor to fight a giant metal man. Maybe he was busy? Hung over. I don't know. It's one thing when you have to travel by car or plane or something, it's another when you can jet around in a suit and get to a fight pretty quickly.
If I remember Iron Man 2 right, about the time Thor was fighting The Destroyer, Iron Man was fighting Whiplash. So either Iron Man wasn't considered reliable or was too damaged from the fight to help in time.
Iron Man was probably recovering from his battle against Whiplash, assuming of course that the events in Iron Man track with those in Thor. It would mean that Thor's hammer was discovered by Agent Coulson after Iron Man's climactic battle, and he was also being kept sort of "out of the loop" by this time, compliments of Nick Fury, so I personally don't see much of a problem with Iron Man not showing up during Thor's fight with The Destroyer.
Well there are several ways this can be addressed. First is pride, Iron Man doesn't want to involve the team in his personal business (assuming the villain is involved with SI already). Or he's overconfident that he can handle it himself and refuses to ask for help. Or Hulk could be having one of his "moments" and the others have to pacify him.
Or perhaps they do help out in the end and we see some character growth in Stark that it's OK to ask and accept help from your friends.