While the first “Iron Man” was seen as a gamble by Marvel Studios, the second installment looks to be a box-office home-run.  Audiences are eager for more of Tony Stark’s world and with the success of the first film, “Iron Man 2” is set to break box office records when it opens next weekend.

As he began to work on the story for the second movie, director Jon Favreau says one of the bigger challenges was finding a villain for the second installment since Iron Man’s rogues gallery isn’t as well known or as relevant today as those of Batman or Spider-Man.

“Iron Man was the international hero so he most closely reflected the politics of the day,” he tells Vanity Fair. “Daredevil was dealing with muggers in Hell’s Kitchen and crime bosses—The Kingpin, those are timeless villains. But somebody who represents the intimidation and technologies and spending power of the Soviet Union is no longer applicable. There’s a nostalgic aspect to the Iron Man franchise for me. It’s not really futuristic, it’s a nostalgic look at the future [as the past envisioned it]. I wanted to maintain some of that. Although, it’s really anachronistic now to have a Soviet Union villain. So the new paradigm for the dark Russian is the underworld figure, the tattooed Viggo Mortensen convict type [from ‘Eastern Promises’], whose reach extends through various connections. And we maintain the Soviet flavor with [Rourke character’s] dad and Tony’s dad.”

Favreau is a fan of the characters in the original Marvel comics series but said that he wasn’t bound to accurately recreate the comic panels on the silver screen. He said hard core Iron Man fans will notice that while Whiplash has some of the characteristics and look from the comic book, in other ways the new movie has taken some creative license with him.

“We try to match things up a little, do a little deconstruction and use elements from the books, but mix them up in a way that it keeps the people that know everything from the books guessing a little bit. Yet it reflects that we honored the source material,” he says.”

“we have fun with characters like Black Widow and Nick Fury. We borrow from the Ultimate [Universe] as well. We have a little fun choosing which face of Black Widow we show, whether she’s the assassin that’s after Tony or the member of S.H.I.E.L.D. And it was also a way of introducing Crimson Dynamo without just having another version of Iron Monger right off the bat … where it’s just a dude in a suit showing up as the Soviet Iron Man. That didn’t seem appropriate,” he continues.

Favreau said another problem with introducing some of the more iconic villains that Iron Man faced was that it’s hard to translate them into the current times.

“If you think a Soviet villain is anachronistic, the way the Mandarin was depicted in the books would be very distasteful, nowadays. And so you have to crystallize The Mandarin down to what it is that makes him scary and intimidating. We have to create the world, and the world we’ve created up to this point has been based in technology,” he says.

Fans may be expecting the second installment to be a big-screen adaptation of the popular “Demon in a Bottle” storyline. And while Favreau says that was a starting point and an inspiration, they only borrowed elements from it and didn’t replicate it wholesale for the new film.

“If you look at the storyline of “Demon in a Bottle,” we follow the plot points of that. We don’t delve as deeply into it totally, because “Demon in a Bottle” was a very depressing exploration of alcoholism,” he says. “Here, we obliquely touch upon things, but the reason Rhodey [Don Cheadle] first puts the suit on is because Iron Man is not capable of handling the mantle of his responsibility. And that’s the same thing in this movie. We do a tip of the hat to that, but we do it in a tone people are accustomed to for our franchise. There are so many comic-book movies operating on parallel paths; if we became a little bit too playful, it would have verged on Spider-Man. If we had gotten too dark, it would have verged on Batman. So we have our own lane in the highway that we like to stick to.”

We’ll have a lot more about “Iron Man 2” in this week’s episode of Slice of SciFi. And don’t forget the movie opens in theaters next Friday.