I stumbled across this online.
What are your thoughts?
It looks hot to me!
I loved Iron Man as a kid. This looks like a bad remake of RoboCop. Most comics don’t translate too well to the big screen. Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Dare Devil, Electra they all sucked. I don’t have high hopes for Iron Man. I actually almost liked “The Punisher” and I did like the original Superman when I saw it the first time as a kid. I still like it but I am guessing nostalgia has more to do with it than quality movie making. Spider Man was …entertaining but didn’t live up to my memories mainly because Toby is such a bad actor.
Missed the edit window.
Forgot to mention (understandably) Batman. The last one was OK. As for the others? Please, Mister Mom was not a good choice for the roll.
I think you’re the only one who says that. Hell, even George Clooney used to say that he killed that franchise.
He is most certainly NOT the only one who says that.
Well, whoever killed the Batman franchise coughkilmercough Downey Jr, is an excellent choice for Stark. I’m going to go see this. At the very least it will be good for some 'splosions, at best it may kick arse. Looking at Jon Favreau’s (director) IMDB entry I’ve never seen any of the films he’s directed in the past. I’ve never seen it, but Elf? I don’t have super high hopes with that in his credits.
I’ve yet to see FF 2 or Spiderman 3 I think I’m going to have a superhero movie marathon one of these days.
You see the helicopters? That’s my unit. I practically begged to be allowed to go to the movie shooting, but they picked someone else for the crew.
Bastards. I am easily the biggest dork in the squadron, they shoulda let me be in it.
cough cough cough JOEL SCHUMAKER cough cough cough 
I might see it as long as they don’t try to put some political anti-war spin on it.
Yeah, not by a long shot. Hell, I didn’t think Nicholson was good casting. Wrong kind of crazy for the role.
As to the OP; I’m cautiously optimistic about the Iron Man flic. I think RD jr. is a very interesting choice for the role, because his life experiences of success-tragic substance abuse problems-recovery parallel Stark’s own story arc with it’s heavy themes of personal difficulties, IIRC (mind you, I haven’t really read comicbooks in something like 10 years, and even then I mostly read X-Men stuff and Ghost Rider)
Okay, I disagree with askeptic on more than a few movies. Punisher (both of them) were terrible, Spiderman X-men were both great for the first two flicks (I enjoyed X3, but it wasn’t up to the same level as the first two, and I haven’t seen Spiderman 3 yet, sadly).
As for the Batman stuff, I think Keaton was fairly good as Batman, didn’t really care for Batman Begins (the last one). The casting for everyone (but the romantic interest, of course) was good, but the plot was lame, the “I won’t kill people, but I’ll freely set in motion a chain of events that almost guarantees someone’s going to die” shtick was weak, the Batmobile chase-scene was absurd, and Christian Bale’s Batman voice was more than a bit overdone. But for me, the best incarnation of Batman always has been, and always will be, Bruce Timm’s animated series (Batman: the Animated Series, New Adventures of Batman, Batman Beyond, & Justice League).
Oh, and thank you Miller! I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who didn’t like Nicholson for Joker. So many people rave about him in the role, but he just wasn’t good in it. He didn’t play the Joker, he played “stereotypical Jack Nicholson character (with insanity level set to 9)”.
Keaton did a good job with Batman.
Batman Begins was definitely the best Batman movie yet made, and one of the best superhero movies made.
I also agree. The Joker is a different kind of menace – he could be loud or quiet, and he could come across like a pal until he stabs you in the back, or he could just as easily murder an entire room of people with a tommy gun. He should be sexually androgynous with just enough of a leering, effeminate quality to make anyone ill at ease in his presence (like you don’t know if he’s going to rape you before or after he murders you). I think the way the Joker was portrayed in The Killing Joke and Dark Knight Returns would have been perfect for Burton’s 1989 movie, and David Bowie would have been the ideal choice for that unknowable, creepy sadist.
It looks like they may go more in this direction for the upcoming Dark Knight film, and I think Heath Ledger is a very interesting choice. I have the utmost faith in Christopher Nolan after Batman Begins, although my top casting choices for the Joker this time around would have been Crispin Glover (just plain crazy), Mark Hamill (stunt-casting), and Michael Keaton (even more stunt-casting, but think about how creepy and lecherous he was as Beetlejuice!)
As for Iron Man, I think the character is tailor-made to adapt to film, just like Batman and Spider-Man. I think Favreau GETS the character and the source material, and Downey (a comic book fanboy himself) does too. I think this is going to be one of the strongest comic book adaptations yet, and the potential for sequels and merchandising is limitless.
But which Joker do you mean? He’s had many characterizations over the years and your description is no more representative of the Joker than the guy who uses giant props to kill Batman.
Nicholson’s Joker was inspired a perfect melding of the Joker legend and the Nicholson legend. In addition, having him kill Thomas Wayne was a brilliant touch, and Keaton was very good as Batman.
I meant the right Joker, the Joker of the mid-'80s to the present, the Joker I like, just like the Batman I like is the Batman of Frank Miller, Grant Morrison, Paul Dini, and Bruce Timm.
And on that note, I thought that the '89 movie Joker killing the Waynes was a horrible twist, since the killer should really remain unknown – a faceless, cowardly thug who is never identified or caught. Batman desperately hopes every criminal he punches or brings to justice is the man who killed his parents while he looked on, but that guy is long gone.
I just saw the trailer.
My god, I think that they actually get it.
I’m thinking that the trailer wasn’t awesome enough to keep the thread from being mostly about Batman.
That may simply be characteristic behavior of comic book fans; however, I suspect that it also speaks to the appeal of Iron Man. It’s not a good sign when the character’s movie trailer prompts people to talk about other comic movie franchises instead of the movie at hand.
Why are we even supposed to like Iron Man, anyway? The trailer doesn’t really help to establish this. He’s presented as a smug dick who puts on a battlesuit and becomes… a smug dick in a battlesuit. I would hope that there’s more to it than that in the movie. Come to think of it, was there ever any more to it than that in the comics? “Though I’m an incredibly handsome super-genius multibillionare, I secretly fight crime while wearing only the most sophisticated armor on the planet!” Ideally, shouldn’t there be some level of disparity between those two roles? I’m hard-pressed to recall a particularly heartwarming or inspirational Iron Man adventure.
That’s debatable. I like the way they handled it in “Batman Begins”. Bruce knows. He was cheated out of direct vengeance. He realized that he didn’t really want revenge, per se, after all. But I definitely agree that the killer, be it Joe Chill or an unknown, ought not to be the piece’s main villain. It’s more poignant if the Waynes are killed in a random street crime rather than by a supervillain. Also, more practically, if the Joker killed the Waynes, that makes him the ultimate Batman villain, and anything you want to throw at him in the sequels is inevitably a step down.
As for Iron man:
This isn’t really the trailer. This is just a handful of finished footage shown at Comicon. It’s intended audience is a bunch of geeks who are pre-sold on the character, and were guranteed to scream in joy when they showed the final armor. It’s to get them excited, and talking up the film to their buddies. When the release date gets closer, we’ll see more polished ads and get a better sense of who Tony is and what he’s doing. Me, I find Tony’s snark delicious in this clip, and the armor does look cool, so this looks promising.
I just wonder how the hell Marvel Comics hopes to dig Iron Man out of the hole they’ve put him in. I mean, at the moment they’re marketing comics based on fans’ desire to see him beaten and humiliated. That seems incompatible with capitalizing a star role in a film.
Oh yeah I forgot the thread started asking about Iron Man.
Oh well… I think Terrifel is right!
But, I’m holding out hope.
I’ve been pretty happy with the comic-turned-live-action fare as of late (Transformers, FF, Spider-Man etc.). Only time will tell.