The news broke last week that Jon Favreau, the acclaimed director of both Iron Man movies will not be back for a third outing. "It's true, I'm directing Magic Kingdom, not Iron Man 3. I've had a great run with Marvel and wish them the best," he tweeted.
Fav informed
Marvel/Disney of his decision last week, and since then there has been much speculation as to why. Some suggest it was
Fav's pricetag which would conceivably rise to $15m from IM2's $10 together with 15% of the gross which was too much for penny-pinching
Marvel. The more likely scenario however is that
Fav felt that
Marvel were shoehorning too much of the "
Marvel Universe" into his movie already feeling by some reports that there was a bit too much "
Avengers advertising" in
IM2 as it stood and there was little reason to believe it would change in the wake of
The Avengers movie.
Fav himself has since said that he opted to work on making
Magic Kingdom for
Disney rather than helm
Iron Man 3 because he wished to "blow people away, which is easier to do with a project that isn't loaded with built-in expectations." I certainly can't fault him for that, I couldn't think how he could top his stellar work thus far and that burden is now lifted from him.
Marvel are currently searching for a director to helm
Iron Man 3 for it's May 3rd 2013 release date but one hurdle they will have to jump is
Robert Downey Jr. himself. His contract stipulates that he must approve of any replacement director.
It's no secret how I feel about the
Iron Man movies thus far so this news has me concerned. However since I had no exposure to any of
Fav's work before the original
Iron Man, and he turned out to be best man for the job; I shall reserve judgement on the director until I see the movie. Unless it's declared to be
Brett Ratner at which point I'll blow my head off.
Sources: IGN / AICN / LA Times