All Sides Suit Up To Negotiate the Future of Marvel… Maybe With Blade, Ms. Marvel, Black Panther, and The Runaways?

If you’ve been seeing a lot of news stories lately where Robert Downey, Jr. casually says something to the effect of “I’m not going to be playing Iron Man forever” or “yeah, I’d be interested in seeing who else could be Tony Stark,” it might be informative for you to remember that his contract actually is up to be renegotiated in this post Iron Man 3 era. These seemingly casual remarks are actually the first salvos in the epic game of moneyball that’s about to be played between Downey and Marvel Entertainment over what he’ll be paid to appear in The Avengers 2 and possibly The Avengers 3.

This means that some news outlets are pulling out all their unnamed sources to talk some straight insider talk about the contract negotiations between Downey, all of his Avengers co-stars, and Marvel. So you should take this with a grain of salt, but one of those news outlets is claiming that Marvel is mulling over script ideas for some pretty exciting secondary characters.

According to The Hollywood Reporter:

Marvel has a writing program it uses as a concept generator and has scripts for Blade and Ms. Marvel features, for example. Doctor Strange, Iron Fist, Black Panther and The Runaways are other projects on the horizon. The company slowly has been reacquiring licenses to characters it lost during the 1990s, snapping up Blade, Ghost Rider, Power Man and Daredevil in the past year alone.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that Marvel’s program is a group of writers and not, say, a computer that poops out movie scripts like some kind of cross between Alex Kurzman, Roberto Orci, and the Supreme Intelligence. A Doctor Strange project has long been rumored, but Ms. Marvel (who goes by Captain, these days) is something of a surprise, though a welcome one. An Iron Fist movie would be bereft without the inclusion of Power Man, better known as Luke Cage. And a Runaways film, featuring Marvel’s team of renegade, grown up hating teen superheroes, that tied into the larger Avengers universe as set up in the movies could be downright fascinating to see. In any case: none of this means that these films are getting made, just perhaps that Marvel is considering it.

And if you’re still worried about Robert Downey, Jr., I wouldn’t. It’s still a fact that the least successful Iron Man movie grossed more than any Marvel movie without Iron Man in it. When the dust settles at the end of Down and Marvel’s game, he’ll be wearing the suit.

(via The Hollywood Reporter.)