A rumor can happen a number of ways. An actor can casually let something slip in an interview. A toy company can release a toy tie-in that reveals a vital plot point. Or, in some cases, both can happen and inventive rumor mongers can combine the two with a comic book event and turn it into an even bigger rumor.
That’s what is happening today. Today, Geoff Boucher of Entertainment Weekly’s Cape Town blog posted part two of a five part interview with Iron Man 3 star Robert Downey Jr. In this installment, Downey Jr volunteered an enticing piece of vague, yet tantalizing information:
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Iron Man 3 picks up not long after the alien invasion of New York where Tony Stark went into battle at the side of a thunder god, a living legend from WWII and a giant green man-monster. Will we see any of those Avengers in this movie? Or does this movie need to be Tony’s Me Party?
Robert Downey Jr.: The whole Avengers thing [with $1.5 billion in global box office was such a relief and such a confirmation of [Marvel Studios President] Kevin Feige’s vision for this all along. As Kevin has put it, the next step after that is to bring in someone like Shane Black and – without pretending that the Avengers don’t exist – find a way to go back to a kind of re-investigation of Tony’s world, which he thought would be, one, fun for the audience and, two, would rock in a different way than The Avengers. But we can’t help it — everywhere you look now in every Marvel movie there are opportunities where certain new pals of his could be useful. So they’re in the atmosphere, so to speak, but I wouldn’t expect to see them on the ground in this one.
Boucher left the “in the atmosphere” comment alone, but by the way he promoted the interview, he definitely considered that a hint. And it was a hint that got movie sites thinking.
Adam Chitwood over at Collider began debating if it might be Thor, whose film Thor: The Dark World opens November 8, might be the character in the atmosphere, perhaps another view of Thanos or a first look at the Guardians of the Galaxy.
El Mayimbe of Latino Review examined the statement a little bit harder. And then they recalled a press release from Funko Toys announcing their line of Iron Man 3 Pop! Vinyl figures. One of the announced figures was a curious “Deep Space Suit Iron Man,” which seemed out of place with the other film-centric figures of the line. Curiosity piqued, El Mayimbe contacted his Marvel sources, and they confirmed his suspicions:
According to sources, at the end of Iron Man 3, Tony actually does go up into space to hook up with the Guardians of The Galaxy where I also hear he appears at the end of that movie as well.
If true, this is pretty big news, and fairly good detective work by El Mayimbe. And to provide further proof this is correct, Mayimbe points out that Marvel is coming out with a new Guardians of the Galaxy comic book, and Iron Man is a character in that. However, the rumor does have something standing in the way of it accepted as the gospel, as Chitwood points out:
The only thing that gives me pause is the fact that James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy isn’t cast yet, so that makes it kind of hard to film a Guardians scene with RDJ’s Tony Stark. That said, Joss Whedon and Co. filmed a scene for The Avengers just a few weeks before that film hit theaters, so the precedence is there for a last-minute shoot. We’ll know for sure when Iron Man 3 hits theaters on May 3rd.
To that I’d like to add that the bonus scene that was shot the week before was the “Shwarma” scene at the end of the credits, which consisted of the characters sitting around and eating. If Tony is going up into space at the end of Iron Man 3, there has to be some kind of special effects in it, effects that might take more than a few weeks to generate. By my logic, the scene has already been shot. Of course, this does not automatically rule out the Guardians of the Galaxy–the space scenes could be already shot and the actors, whoever they might be, will be green screened in after. Or, Marvel has been engaging in a campaign of misinformation and the Guardians are already cast and have shot their first scene. Or, the characters Tony meets could be completely computer generated and only voice actors need to be hired.
Since Iron Man 3 is the start of Phase 2 and any build up the not widely known Guardians of the Galaxy can get would only help, the rumor has an air of plausiblity. I guess we’ll see in just over three months.
