New Iron Man Suit

Picture by Pat Ditton.

While at Comic Con, our intrepid reporter Patrick Ditton attended the Iron Man movie panel. Here are his thoughts:

It takes guts to screen a trailer made from raw footage (no special effects) for a film that will eventually be thick with special effects - but that's just what Jon Favreau did for 20,000 howling Comic Con fans.

Can we say "blockbuster" yet?

If the few minutes of IRON MAN screened for the San Diego crowd are any true indication of what audiences can expect from the film in 2008, then all of us are in for an incredible movie experience. Favreau clipped together a humorous, yet serious, Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark -- the billionaire inventor of military hardware -- and then blew the audience away with action sequences featuring a "nuts and bolts" Iron Man armor that definitely puts the IRON in Iron Man.

To cap it all off, the one shot Favreau gave the crowd that had finished special effects was that of the "updated" Iron Man 2.0 (red and gold) armor flying maneuvers alongside two F-18s only to suddenly kick in the jet-boot after burners and streak off beyond the horizon, leaving the F-18s as if they were sitting still - fade to black and to the roar of cheers from 20,000 thrilled fans.

This could be Marvel's best comic-to-film production yet.

Sounds exciting to me, and looking at the armor it appears that Favreau is once again using models and costumes supplemented with computer graphics rather than "mere" computer rendering on the effects. Both Zathura and Elf used model work in their effects adding wonderful verisimilitude to the fictional worlds that Favreau was presenting to audiences.