Variety reports that Sir Ben Kingsley is now in final negotiations to take on the antagonist role in the third Iron Man pic.

Nope. Uh-uh. No more knighthood until you apologize for being in BloodRayne.

Loosely based on the Extremis storyline, eh? Does that mean we're going to have a battered wife scenario between Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark and Sir Ben Kingsley's Extremis... Kingsley yelling to Downey 'LOVE ME!'

I suppose there's a demographic for that somewhere...

Hollie Maea: Excellent! Ben Kingsley is one of the best actors out there, and his portrayal of Don Logan was one of the best villains I've ever seen.

I keep hearing talk about this one, but did anyone else like him in Sneakers?



'I cannot kill my friend. You! Kill my friend... '

Alphax: Rush Mountmore: Hey guys!! Look! The article says...
Scarlett Johanssen will be back.
No need to panic.

So, possible Tony/Pepper/Black Widow three way?

Probably not, but a man can dream.

Not until we have Ultron to release the sex tape as a promotional tie in!

Since the mandarin has been mentioned in the thread I want to suggest Rain Bi from Ninja Assasin play him if he is chosen as a villain at some point. Yes he is Korean I know but I like Rain.

chimp_ninja: slayer199: chimp_ninja: Apparently, subby has never seen Sexy Beast.

I'd paste in some Don Logan quotes from IMDB, but Fark's filter might not be able to handle the workload.

Thank you. I just came in here to point that out...glad it was covered in the Boobies.

It's not that kind of movie, despite what the title suggests.

I know. Fark filter got me when I typed Boobies

Raug the Dwarf: And see, I'm the opposite. Batman and Stark need to stay home or work over punks in a back alley. Leave the real crisis to the big boys who can actually handle it. I don't care how badass Batman is on the street level. You put him up against Darkseid and you're gonna be scraping up a goo covered cowl off the cobblestones. They have no chance and should have no chance to survive. Make mine cosmic or go home.

The problem I have with the cosmic stuff is that the "rules" are rarely clear or consistent. How strong is Darkseid? Can he be hurt, and if so by what? How fast can spaceships travel? How powerful are their weapons and shields? Why does only one organization in the universe have "genetically coded locks" that can restrain Superman, and that are never heard of again? If Kryptonite is so readily available on Earth, why doesn't anybody else have any? How does time travel work, and why don't people do it all the time [sic] to correct mistakes? Without knowing that kind of stuff, anything can happen (and often does), and consequently nothing is interesting.

Yes, I readily acknowledge that it doesn't have to be that way. It's possible to do cosmic scifi that abides by its own rules. And it's possible to do non-cosmic stories that are riddled with pull-stuff-out-of-their-assery ("did I ever mention that I'm fluent in Portuguese and an experienced escape artist?"). But it does seem that cosmic-scale comic book stories are especially prone to that kind of stuff.

czetie: Raug the Dwarf: And see, I'm the opposite. Batman and Stark need to stay home or work over punks in a back alley. Leave the real crisis to the big boys who can actually handle it. I don't care how badass Batman is on the street level. You put him up against Darkseid and you're gonna be scraping up a goo covered cowl off the cobblestones. They have no chance and should have no chance to survive. Make mine cosmic or go home.

The problem I have with the cosmic stuff is that the "rules" are rarely clear or consistent. How strong is Darkseid? Can he be hurt, and if so by what? How fast can spaceships travel? How powerful are their weapons and shields? Why does only one organization in the universe have "genetically coded locks" that can restrain Superman, and that are never heard of again? If Kryptonite is so readily available on Earth, why doesn't anybody else have any? How does time travel work, and why don't people do it all the time [sic] to correct mistakes? Without knowing that kind of stuff, anything can happen (and often does), and consequently nothing is interesting.

Yes, I readily acknowledge that it doesn't have to be that way. It's possible to do cosmic scifi that abides by its own rules. And it's possible to do non-cosmic stories that are riddled with pull-stuff-out-of-their-assery ("did I ever mention that I'm fluent in Portuguese and an experienced escape artist?"). But it does seem that cosmic-scale comic book stories are especially prone to that kind of stuff.

Booster Gold is keeping the time stream clean.

1. Darkseid is as strong as a pretty strong living god. Darkseid can be hoist by his own petard, or harmed by Radion. Apparently an angry Kryptonian can cause him some level of discomfort.

2. How powerful are lasers and shields is a difficult question to answer without knowing how much or what kind of phlebotinum fuels them.

3. Dubbilex is an asshole. And not a very bright one. There are other ways to restrain a Kryptonian, including shrinking him to bottle size, using sorcery, 5th Dimensional tricks, Black Mercy, or Jimmy Olsen might get supersmart and invent some sort of ray or pill.

4. Superman's birthing matrix came to Kansas with a trailer filled with 50 metric tons of Kryptonite. The remainder of Krypton blew to the size of superatoms and dispersed at superspeed throughout the multiverse.

5. Time Travel is but child's play to manipulate if you are a mad genius. Villains often succeed, many times creating an Elseworld in the process, depending on whether superscience or sorcery is used. Every so often the multiverse groans under the effects of temporal paradoxes and a new Crisis is required to keep the busy writers at Detective Comics hard at work reintroducing the paradoxes they wrote out of continuity. It's a bit of a paradox in and of itself.

Just teasing Czetie. For me the real sin of cosmic level stories is that power creep at a rate beyond exponential. It resembles that Tex Avery cartoon where the cat and the mouse keep drinking a growth serum until both of them are bigger than the planet.

That is, every time that causes some baddie greater than space and time, results in an even MORE infinitely powerful being over space and time. Lord knows beings like the Beyonder or Anti-Monitor aren't powerful enough.

Raug the Dwarf: But I'd still rather read galaxy spanning clashes with beings of incredible power than read about Iron Man busting up a weapon storage warehouse. Mind you, I do read both styles of stories.

I'm happy to read both kinds too, and enjoy them in different ways. Most of the scifi I enjoyed in my younger years was galaxy spanning stuff, including Asimov's Foundation series. Mind you, looking back on it now one of the most interesting elements of Foundation was the interaction between galactic scale [economic and social] forces and individual human relationships and choices. And SG-1, for instance, had galactic-scale conflict done well, precisely because the rules of engagement were well defined.

Where the cosmic stuff loses me is when the story is resolved with a wave of the hand and a "then the Galactic Guardians of Spacetime sacrificed their Golden Cosmic Hyperbuckyball of Causality to restore everything to its rightful place". (And yes, human-scale stories can be equally guilty: see the infamous "and then Mephisto erased a decade of continuity to restore Spider-man to bachelorhood"). And yes, also the impossible-to-quantify power escalation: cosmic clashes quickly become "unstoppable force meets immovable object/infinity divided by zero" arguments that leave you wondering why the other infinitely-powerful beings don't step in.

One of the reasons that I like Iron Man, and that in particular I think he translates well to the screen, is that the capabilities of his suit are beyond what is currently possible, but not so far beyond that it requires a huge suspension of disbelief to allow for the possibility. For similar reasons, Captain America was my book of choice in my youth, when I had the time and energy to follow a monthly publication.