After early reports surfaced last month of Jessica Chastain joining Iron Man 3, the actress said this week that her involvement with the project had in fact been prematurely announced, and that she sadly wouldn’t be able to work the next sequel into her already-busy schedule.
Enter Rebecca Hall.
Variety report that Hall (The Town, Vicky Cristina Barcelona) is now in talks to join the project in Chastain’s place as the female lead, which is fantastic news in my books.
Hall was brilliant in Ben Affleck’s The Town, and I’m already really looking forward to seeing her in a film like this, with a nine-figure budget.
Robert Downey, Jr. will of course be reprising the role with which he’s soared to even greater fame in the past few years, alongside the lovely Gwyneth Paltrow and Don Cheadle, with Guy Pearce and Sir Ben Kingsley joining the franchise for the first time like Hall.
Shane Black, with whom Downey, Jr. worked with on the brilliant Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, is behind the camera after Jon Favreau announced he wouldn’t be returning for the third time around, and Black is directing from a script he co-wrote with Drew Pearce (writer of the upcoming Sherlock Holmes 3).
Black’s work with RDJ on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was nothing short of genius, and everybody’s expecting good things to come from this reunion.
Production is set to get underway in North Carolina this month, before moving on to China, with a release date already set for 3rd May, 2013.
After the phenomenal success, critically and commercially, of The Avengers in the past two weeks, we can expect nothing but awesomeness from the next film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. More as we get it.
