RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Media Robert Downey Jr to be Iron Man

The original Shaft (along with The Mack and Superfly) is iconic in the Black community. I haven't watched it in years but, I saw it prolly 20 times when I was a kid. I was disappointed with his performance and, apparently, so was he since he cited it a payday flick

Re: rhe prequels. The movies were meh but Jackson was cool...especially in ep. 2.

The first Friday box office estimates are just beginning to come in, and according to the tracking website Boxofficeguru.com, in its second weekend Iron Man easily held off the debut of Speed Racer in the battle of "genre" films. In fact, Speed Racer only finished third in the Friday tally, behind the Cameron Diaz/Ashton Kutcher romantic comedy What Happens in Vegas.

Iron Man is estimated to have racked up another $15.3 million on Friday, a 56.6% drop from its opening Friday figure of $35.2m. While it's typical of superhero/comic book based movies to drop in upwards of 50% in their second weekends, if that percentage holds throughout the entire three-day sophomore frame, it may some something of a minor surprise/disappointment for Paramount/Marvel considering the overwhelmingly positive critical and word-of-mouth buzz the film has received.

The gold standard of superhero movie "legs" continues to be 2002's Spider-Man, which dropped only 38% in its second weekend.

As for Speed Racer - subject of much more mixed reception - it's estimated to have made $5.85 million on Friday, placing it below most industry predictions. To put it in some perspective, in its second Friday, Iron Man enjoyed a $3722.00 per screen average, whereas as Speed Racer averaged less than half of that at $1622.00

Point.

However, isn't the movie set in the Afghanistan war? In this situation the weapons are being made and used to kill, not deter.

3X2(9YZ)4A

my screen name

Movie News
'Iron Man 2' Coming in 2010

Following Iron Man's impressive $98.6 million debut this weekend, Marvel Studios has set a date for a sequel: April 30, 2010. Meanwhile, the comic-book-based entertainment company has unveiled the roster of superhero movies it plans to release during the next three years:
· Thor — June 4, 2010 (with Stardust's Matthew Vaughn on board to direct)
· The First Avenger: Captain America — May 6, 2011
· The Avengers — July 2011 (bringing together the characters of Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, and Thor in one movie)
· Ant-Man — In development (with Hot Fuzz's Edgar Wright attached to write and direct)
All of these features will be financed, developed, and produced by Marvel. While the company had enjoyed great success for more than a decade with movies based on many of its popular characters — including Spider-Man, X-Men, and the Fantastic Four — it only recently started fully financing and producing its own films. Iron Man was the first major release under this new plan; The Incredible Hulk arrives in theaters on June 13.

overexposed yes. but he can be a good actor when he wants. but he has done a lot of crap jobs where he just plays himself of late.


Iron Man broke 100 Mill over the weekend.


and they are plotting out The Avengers film franchise.

The scene in which you can see the shield is after Iron Man returns from Afghanistan after fighting with the Mark III red/gold armor for the very first time. Right after he fights the two F-22 fighter jets, it shows him back in his lab trying to remove his armor but having trouble. Right as Pepper Potts walks down into his lab and asks him "what is he doing?", the shield can be seen sitting on one of his tables behind him in the lower left corner. This happens around 1 hour and 30 minutes into the movie. Make sure to account for trailers if you're going in. We confirmed it at a 6:40PM showing and the scene played at around ~8:18PM. Here is a very low quality photo just for reference. It looks much better in the movie.



The shield is actually red, white, and blue, although you can't see the red in the photo. But if you see the scene in the theater, the shield is actually there and very identifiable. It looks like it is half-constructed and being built by Tony Stark, but you can definitely see the unique star. It is a round shield with circular red, white, and blue stripes.

Now, now Fred - I saw it twice too - it really did kick all sorts of ass...

Rex Jameson bikes and swims regularly, and plays tennis and skis when time allows. But the 5-foot-11, 180-pound software engineer is lucky if he presses 200 pounds — that is, until he steps into an "exoskeleton" of aluminum and electronics that multiplies his strength and endurance as many as 20 times.

With the outfit's claw-like metal hand extensions, he gripped a weight set's bar at a recent demonstration and knocked off hundreds of repetitions. Once, he did 500.

"Everyone gets bored much more quickly than I get tired," Jameson said.

Jameson — who works for robotics firm Sarcos Inc. in Salt Lake City, which is under contract with the U.S. Army — is helping assess the 150-pound suit's viability for the soldiers of tomorrow. The suit works by sensing every movement the wearer makes and almost instantly amplifying it.

The Army believes soldiers may someday wear the suits in combat, but it's focusing for now on applications such as loading cargo or repairing heavy equipment. Sarcos is developing the technology under a two-year contract worth up to $10 million, and the Army plans initial field tests next year.

Before the technology can become practical, the developers must overcome cost barriers and extend the suit's battery life. Jameson was tethered to power cords during his demonstration because the current battery lasts just 30 minutes.

But the technology already offers evidence that robotics can amplify human muscle power in reality — not just in the realm of comic books and movies like the recently debuted "Iron Man," about a wealthy weapons designer who builds a high-tech suit to battle bad guys.

"Everybody likes the idea of being a superhero, and this is all about expanding the capabilities of a human," said Stephen Jacobsen, chief designer of the Sarcos suit.

The Army's exoskeleton research dates to 1995, but has yet to yield practical suits. Sarcos' technology sufficiently impressed Raytheon Co., however, that the Waltham, Mass.-based defense contractor bought Sarcos' robotics business last November. Sarcos also has developed robotic dinosaurs for a Universal Studios' "Jurassic Park" theme park ride.

Jack Obusek, a former colonel now with the Army's Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center in the Boston suburb of Natick, foresees robot-suited soldiers unloading heavy ammunition boxes from helicopters, lugging hundreds of pounds of gear over rough terrain or even relying on the suit's strength-enhancing capabilities to make repairs to tanks that break down in inconvenient locations.

Sarcos' Jacobsen envisions factory workers someday using the technology to perform manual labor more easily, and firefighters more quickly carrying heavy gear up stairwells of burning buildings. Disabled people also may find uses for the technology, he said.

"We see the value being realized when these suits can be built in great numbers for both military and commercial uses, and they start coming down in cost to within the range of the price of a small car," said Jacobsen. He declined to estimate how much the suit might cost in mass production.

But cost isn't the only obstacle. For example, developers eventually hope to lengthen the suit's backpack battery's life and tinker with the suit's design to use less energy. Meanwhile, the suit can draw power from a generator, a tank or helicopter. And there are gas engines that, while noisy, small enough to fit into the suit's backpack.

"The power issue is probably the No. 1 challenge standing in the way of getting this thing in the field," Obusek said.

But he said Sarcos appears to have overcome the key challenge of pairing super-fast microprocessors with sensors that detect movements by the body's joints and transmit data about them to the suit's internal computer.

Much as the brain sends signals to tendons to get muscles to move, the computer sends instructions to hydraulic valves. The valves mimic tendons by driving the suit's mechanical limbs, replicating and amplifying the wearer's movements almost instantly.

"With all the previous attempts at this technology, there has been a slight lag time between the intent of the human, and the actual movement of the machine," Obusek said.

In the demonstration, the bulky suit slowed Jameson a bit, but he could move almost normally. When a soccer ball was thrown at him, he bounced it back off his helmeted head. He repeatedly struck a punching bag and, slowly but surely, he climbed stairs in the suit's clunky aluminum boots, which made him look like a Frankenstein monster.

"It feels less agile than it is," Jameson said. "Because of the way the control laws work, it's ever so slightly slower than I am. And because we are so in tune with our bodies' responses, this tiny delay initially made me tense."

Now, he's used to it.

"I can regain my balance naturally after stumbling — something I discovered completely by accident."

Learning was easy, he said.

"It takes no special training, beyond learning to relax and trust the robot," he said.