IRON MAN 3 Trailer, Interview with Marvel President Kevin Feige #DisneyOzEvent #IronMan3
While I was in LA for the premiere of OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL last month, we had the very unique opportunity to meet with Marvel President Kevin Feige, see the trailer that I am sharing with you below as well as view about 20 unfinished portions of the upcoming film. This is so exciting, for I now can share with you two reasons you will want to see Iron Man 3 (as if Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark/Iron Man isn’t enough of a reason), but Gwyneth Paltrow who plays Pepper Potts gets her woman power on, as she gets into the suit…yes the suit – how’s that for a twist? And we also get to meet a new character, Harley, played by Ty Simpkins. He’s adorable and ready to keep Stark on his toes.
Coming off of an incredible rush of the success of The Avengers last year, Marvel has proven itself as a family film company, and with the addition of Simpkins to the cast, this will be an early summer blockbuster you will be wanting to see opening weekend!
Marvel’s “Iron Man 3” pits brash-but-brilliant industrialist Tony Stark/Iron Man against an enemy whose reach knows no bounds. When Stark finds his personal world destroyed at his enemy’s hands, he embarks on a harrowing quest to find those responsible. This journey, at every turn, will test his mettle. With his back against the wall, Stark is left to survive by his own devices, relying on his ingenuity and instincts to protect those closest to him. As he fights his way back, Stark discovers the answer to the question that has secretly haunted him: does the man make the suit or does the suit make the man?
Starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Rebecca Hall, Stephanie Szostak, James Badge Dale with Jon Favreau and Ben Kingsley, Marvel’s “Iron Man 3” is directed by Shane Black from a screenplay by Drew Pearce & Shane Black and is based on Marvel’s iconic Super Hero Iron Man, who first appeared on the pages of “Tales of Suspense” (#39) in 1963 and had his solo comic book debut with “The Invincible Iron Man” (#1) in May of 1968.
A little Q & A with President of Marvel, Kevin Feige –
When he’s working with (new character) Harley. Do you see a lot of smart-aleckness of Tony Stark in him, with the little boy, or did you soften it up and you miss some of that?
Uh, no. He is quite the smart-aleck with- with the little boy, oh yes. He’s sort of- the boy is shocked at first, and then slowly begins to sort of give as good as he gets from Tony. So that- that certainly continues.
Women and action movies are not necessarily words that are synonymous, but Marvel has really done a good job of getting women interested. Avengers was something women were really drawn to. How much though do you put into bringing the female audience in?
Well, I mean we want these movies to play for everyone. We think they are for everyone. And I don’t know that we necessarily sit down and go, how do we make men like this movie? How do we make women like this movie? We don’t do that. Part of what we love about our characters is they, they’re human, they’re flawed. They react even with aliens coming at them and armored suits flying at them and villains shooting rays at them. The way they respond to those situations, we try to make it as emotionally truthful as possible.
So we want the most fantastic thing to be the outer space elements of Avengers. The advanced technology of Iron Man. Let that be the comic book element. But the human interaction should be real. It should be as real as possible. Um, and I think that appeals to people who might not just love the explosions and the loud noises and the clacking and the repulsing. In this franchise in particular, and it’s sort of unique, frankly. This is now the fourth movie if you count Avengers with Iron Man.
He’s (Tony Stark) been with the same woman (Pepper Potts) the whole time, and the relationship just grows. And the relationship gets deeper and deeper. And in this film they live together. AYou saw a little bit of the- of the banter with Rebecca Hall who plays a new character, Maya. But the truth of the matter is, the love triangle in this movie is really between Tony, Pepper and the suits. Tony, Pepper and his obsession with those suits, and the obsession with technology. It’s sort of unique for a big superhero Summer blockbuster franchise to have, I think, that kind of layers.
And that really yes there’s a bad guy, yes the stakes are very, very high, the President of the United States is in danger. You saw in the trailer Air Force One is attacked. There are big stakes to this movie. But the real stakes are, is Tony going to be able to set aside the obsession to spend all day, every day in that workshop, tinkering with the suits, in order to focus on, as he says in the trailer, the one thing that matters most – Pepper. That actually is what the entire movie’s about.
As we lead into the finale, yes he has to save the world, but it’s really about, about the relationship between those two. Which, it was not the case with James Bond or Indiana Jones or pick your, you know, leading male hero. So I think that’s unique. But that’s also what it is in the comics. And that’s what we want to bring to life on the screen.
Can you talk about Marvel working with Disney?
Well, I’ll tell you a few things. One is, I’m obsessed with Disney and with Disney theme parks, and when I was first told by the heads of Marvel, that, uh, what do you think of Disney? We’re thinking of selling the company. I was like…I pulled out my wallet, I got the annual pass, the Disney DVC membership, all of that stuff, because I was just obsessed with it. That’s what my family did, was go to the Disney theme parks every year. And still do, over New Years down in Florida.
So I sort of loved that, and I thought it was great. I thought…and I understood why they wanted us, because they didn’t- they didn’t have, you know, necessarily things for boys and for that- and for that market. And they were very great in early meetings we had with them. They said, like Pixar, we like what you’re doing. We want you to keep doing what you’re doing. And that was, I don’t know, two years ago now. Two or three years ago. And that has- that has certainly held true. They’ve let us make the movies we want to make the way we make them.
The best thing, and Avengers is the perfect example of it, is what they can tap into. Groups like yourselves. All of the marketing that they bring to it. The passion that they bring to it. They did a spectacular job with marketing the Avengers. And tapping into everything that a company as huge as Disney can do. But at the same time, what I love most about them is, despite it being the biggest entertainment conglomerate on earth, I think it is, it’s Disney. And it’s, it can be very personal. And can be very…you know.
And as we hope- you know, to get into more of the parks and things like that, I want kids to be able to come experience Marvel the way I would go experience the Disney parks. And I still do. It’s been very positive in the fact that we have a home now. Well, the first Iron Man film, the second Iron Man film, for Captain America were distributed by another studio, who did a very good job with those movies, but it was just sort of a, a side arrangement we had with them. We were one of a number of things they were distributing.
It is clearly a family here with Disney and they put everything into it when the movie comes out.
Avengers was marketed towards families. How do you perceive the marketing for Iron Man 3? Another family film?
Well, all of our movies are PG-13. I know parents who take their four year olds, and I know parents who won’t let their kids see them until they’re thirteen. For us, there are things you can do if you are going by the letter of the law in a PG-13 movie. There’s a level of violence you can add, there’s a level of sexuality you can have, there’s a level of language you can have. We never go anywhere near that, top of that. Because we don’t want to. Because that’s not what our characters are about.
When you have the amount of fighting and explosions and some blood on his nose when he puts the suit on, we do want that. We want it to be real. Otherwise it’s just a CG thing hitting a CG person. So that’s why we’re always in that PG-13 range. We have kids. We want to be able to take our kids to these movies and to enjoy them. It’s really the level of intensity that determines whether parents are comfortable taking their kids to it as opposed to content, necessarily.
In terms of the marketing of this movie, if you go back and look at the marketing of Avengers, it’s a much…it promises a much darker important movie than the movie actually is. The movie is much more fun than the trailer would show. Same thing with this. This trailer is, he’s being blown apart, his life is at stake, how will he get out of it? The movie is much, much funner. Much more fun than that, but that’s what gets people into the audience. What’s gonna happen? Thank goodness, that’s what we want.
In terms of what differentiates it, I mean I do think that- that there’s a legacy with Marvel, and there’s a history with Marvel. And you have grandparents and parents and kids and little kids that know them whether they read them. I’ve met people that are eighty years old, ninety years old, that talk about reading a Captain American comic in the…I don’t know if they were actually in the trenches, but somewhere- at some point in World War II. And I had a three year old nephew, and I have a four year old daughter who asked me all about Iron Man. Does he fly? Is he a robot? Is he– What is it? Because of the toys. Or because of the pajamas, or because of the shoes. I love that about Marvel. I love that it can stay cool and relevant from a two year old to a twelve year old to a twenty-two year old to a ninety-two year old. That’s important to us. How we do it differently? I can’t really tell you, other than to say, we always just focus on the character. It always starts with, what do want this character to go through? What mission do we want the character…? What emotional sort of depth and growth do we want him to go through? Then we think of all the cool stuff to put him through, as opposed to, oh I always wanted to see Iron Man’s house fall into the sea. We don’t start there. We start with what is the character journey we want to take him on? And we really do. We call him Tony Stark, not Iron Man. When we’re just in our own meetings, we refer to Captain America as Steve. We refer to Thor as Thor. We refer to… [LAUGHTER] uh, Hulk as Bruce. Because these are, you know, real people that we want to- to continue to flush out movie to movie to movie.
Such an awesome interview. There’s more that I will share in a later post. For now enjoy the trailer, the new poster and follow them, like them and visit their website!
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IRON MAN 3 releases in theaters on May 3rd!
*This event and trip was sponsored by Disney. All opinions are my own.
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We are so excited for Ironman 3. We loves the first two, and this one looks just as awesome.
My son is so super excited about this movie and after reading your post, I am too!
All of my boys LOVE the Marvel movies and can hardly wait to see Iron Man 3. I love ’em, too.