Shane Black was a panelist at the Omaha Film Festival over the weekend and discussed, among other things, he’s role in the upcoming Iron Man 3, which he was recently confirmed as director and speculation remained as to whether or not he would also be penning the screenplay.
In a question and answer, attended by a reader from AICN, Black confirmed he was writing the screenplay and was scheduled to meet with the film’s title star, Robert Downey Jr., this week in Los Angeles as Downey will be contributing to the story. This last bit is absolutely no surprise as it was mentioned several times how much Downey assisted on the first film almost every morning discussing the progression of the story.
During Comic Con back in 2007 Downey told me, “Truth be told, I had a lot of creative input [in Iron Man] and often days we’d come in and I would say, ‘Boy I’ve seen that in…’ — I went in basically every day, even when we had a good script I would go in and take the pages and I threw them on the ground and Jon would be like, ‘Good morning!'”
Downey Jr. and Black have already worked together on Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and based on that film’s result I would suspect both Black and Downey have a good feel for one another and the idea of them collaborating in some way in terms of forging a story is encouraging.
As for Iron Man 3‘s story, Black mentioned how the studio wasn’t happy with the result of Iron Man 2, a result that pretty much came about due to a rushed production in an attempt to hit a release date rather than simply make a good film, but I digress. Black said, Iron Man 3 will not be another “two men in iron suits fighting each other” film. Instead, it will be more like a Tom Clancy-thriller, with Iron Man fighting real world villains. You know, sort of how the first Iron Man should have ended before devolving into a bunch of metal beating on metal.
Disney is already set to release Iron Man 3 on May 3, 2013, one year after the Marvel superhero team-up in The Avengers hits theaters on May 4, 2012. Black said not to expect Iron Man 3 to feature any other heroes from Marvel’s universe saying that after The Avengers the plan is to go back to self-contained single-character stories.
This last bit seems a little deceptive since a character such as Nick Fury hasn’t necessarily been portrayed as a “superhero” per se, so I guess Black could get off on a technicality with that comment. Instead I read that statement more as saying Iron Man will be the focus of the story, there won’t be some idea of a grander scheme, which is something that was incredibly evident in Iron Man 2, which was, more or less, a commercial for The Avengers with a final, after credits scene used to promote Thor.
Looking over the entire bit of news, it seems Black is on the right track and I’m happy to see him working again seeing how a six year absence since the excellent Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang just did not seem right.
