The nights are drawing in and it's chilly outside. Yes, it's winter and thus the perfect time for Hollywood to start banging on about its big summer blockbusters. That's why, right now, you can barely move for photos and
snippets and rumours about
Iron Man 2.
The point of them, of course, is to gee everybody up into a breathless froth ready for its release in May. However – and I might alone here – every new snippet of information about Iron Man 2 is making me a little bit more worried about it.
Although it ended up getting overshadowed by The Dark Knight,
the first Iron Man felt like a breath of fresh air when it was released last year. Although it had to balance Tony Stark's origins story with
Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges and a shedload of exploding robots, it still left enough space for
Robert Downey Jr to be as breezy and irreverent as he liked. It wasn't a film about a tortured soul grappling with the weight of his social responsibility; it was Ocean's Eleven in a jetpack.
But this time round, it seems as though there won't be time for any of that. This time Iron Man 2 will have to balance Robert Downey Jr with Sam Rockwell and
Scarlett Johansson and
Mickey Rourke and Don Cheadle and
Samuel L Jackson and Gwyneth Paltrow, and a shedload of exploding robots. Plus, there's a good chance that Tony Stark's also going to be an alcoholic in this one. And that's where the worry starts to seep in.
A tangled love story? Too many villains? A hero struggling with his demons? Unless I'm mistaken, that sounds just like Spider-Man 3 – a superhero movie legendary in its bloated naffness. We've still got six months before Iron Man 2 is released – what's the betting that we'll soon start seeing magazines filled with exclusive on-set photos of the excruciating scene where Tony Stark dances around and cooks some eggs with Pepper Potts, or the bit where he grows a new haircut to indicate that he's turned evil?
Jon Favreau undoubtedly knows what he's doing, but the only feasible way that Iron Man 2 could cram in all of these different elements and still allow time for Robert Downey Jr to clown around would be to increase the film's length. And all that tends to do is make audiences shift around and worry about the onset of deep-vein thrombosis.
I'm only worried because I loved Iron Man. I want to love Iron Man 2. But I want the makers to remember what was so good about the original. After all, people won't watch Iron Man 2 to see hour after hour of mind-numbing action sequences. That's what Michael Bay is for, surely.
