‘The Avengers’ Begins Shooting Tomorrow!, Plus Shane Black Is Co-Writing ‘Iron Man 3’?

There’s a  potpourri  of Marvel movie news today, jettisoning out of various gulches and gorges and uh, maybe gulches don’t jettison anything. But still.

First Off, ‘The Avengers’  Totally Begins Shooting Tomorrow:

Marvel’s great Avengers experiment is about to begin. Joss Whedon wrote in to Whedonesque today to announce that The Avengers begins shooting tomorrow. Specifically he said (in part): “Tomorrow we start shooting (I THINK I’m legally permitted to say that). Day one. That’s right. We’ll be shooting the pivotal death/betrayal/product placement/setting up the sequel/coming out scene, at the following address:” at which point the email goes a bit off the rails, but I think you get the point.

And then there’s news that Shane Black may be co-writing Iron Man 3:

So when Marvel hired Shane Black for Iron Man 3 (he being the screenwriter who rose to fame with Lethal Weapon and made a great directorial debut with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) the assumption was that he would write as well as direct. But some hopes were quickly squashed when Drew Pearce was announced as the writer of Iron Man 3.

At the time, we knew that he’d be working closely with Shane Black on the script. Now CinemaBlend has “heard from multiple, completely trustworthy sources” that Shane Black will in fact co-write the film.

The site has conflicting info on why Drew Pearce was brought in at all, with one argument saying Disney is nervous about Black’s R-rated history and wants another more family-friendly voice. Or is it just that this is only Black’s second directorial effort, and a much more complicated proposition than Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, so he has a pretty full plate to begin with?

Thoughts on any of this? As Slashfilm intimated when they used the word “experiment”, I’m anxious to see whether the past three years they’ve spent building their Marvel universe wasn’t in fact spent wasting narratives that could have been tighter on their own in favor of some marketing synergy orgasm.

We’ll see.