Entertainment Weekly caught up with both Robert Downey Jr. and director Jon Favreau after the box office figures for Iron Man started coming in. They asked both about Iron Man 2, coming to theaters on April 30, 2010.
Here’s a clip from the Downey Jr. interview, which you can read in full here:
When you were brainstorming with Jon Favreau, what were the elements that you wanted to bring to the next Iron Man movie?
There’s this idea of Terrence [Howard] putting on a suit and coming back as War Machine, who is pretty iconic in the Iron Man and Marvel universe. Just seeing where it can all go, but grounding it in a very modern mythology. I see it as greatest dysfunctional family story ever told…. In The New York Post a couple days ago, [there was a cartoon] of Iron Man suited up, and he’s telling the governor even his super-powers can’t get him out of the budget problem. That was what Jon was hoping for and excited to see the most, the idea that Tony Stark and Iron Man can become part of the cultural fabric. When we heard posters were being defaced to promote political or social ideas, he just got such a hoot out of that.
And a bit from the Favreau interview, available in full here.
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.
Iron Man earned an additional $6.9 million on Monday and has pushed its domestic total to $109 million.