Kevin Feige Explains IRON MAN 3 High Stakes, Family Appeal, Pepper Potts Suiting Up And More
Addressing the Marvel threequel’s love triangle, high stakes and marketing, Kevin Feige also discusses Iron Man 3’s PG-13 rating and a new kid character Tony Stark will interact with. Read on for details!
By DCMarvelFreshman - 3/14/2013
In speaking lengthily with About.com, Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige acknowledged new details about Iron Man 3, its high stakes, family appeal and inevitable PG-13 rating, among other things.
While there’s been speculation about a love rectangle involving new characters, Feige suggests:
“The love triangle in this movie is really between Tony, Pepper and the suits. Tony, Pepper and his obsession with those suits, and the obsession with technology. And, it’s sort of unique for a big superhero summer blockbuster franchise to have that kind of layers. Yes, there’s a bad guy. Yes, the stakes are very, very high--the President of the United States is in danger. Air Force One is attacked. There are big stakes to this movie. But the real stakes are, is Tony going to be able to set aside the obsession to spend all day, every day in that workshop, tinkering with the suits in order to focus on, as he says in the trailer, the one thing that matters most - Pepper. And that actually is what the entire movie’s about.”
“In this movie we play with the convention of the damsel in distress. We are bored by the damsel in distress. But, sometimes we need our hero to be desperate enough in fighting for something other than just his own life. So, there is fun to be had with "Is Pepper in danger or is Pepper the savior?" over the course of this movie. In terms of where we go with future movies, we’ll see. In the comic books she does get a taste for the suit and becomes her own hero named Rescue, who doesn’t necessarily battle other people, but is on missions to help people and to save people. Will we do that down the line with Gwyneth Paltrow? Who knows. But her being in the suit is something we have been playing with since Iron Man 2, where we did some designs and it didn’t end up fitting in that movie. But the little taste you saw here [in a clip] is something that we’re certainly interested in.”
Early Iron Man 3 footage shown during a press event revealed an admired scene involving Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark coming in contact with a ten year-old kid named Harley, played by child actor Ty Simpkins. Kevin Feige goes on explaining:
“Here [Tony] is in the middle of Tennessee with his hat pulled low, and he’s trying to do this investigation. And there's this very sweet and funny relationship that he begins with this little boy. He is quite the smart-aleck with the little boy, oh yes. The boy is shocked at first, and then slowly begins to sort of give as good as he gets from Tony. We auditioned lots and lots of kids, and Tyson came in and was just a real kid. He could barely keep a straight face looking at Robert. He bonded with Robert completely, and we decided, you know what, this is the kid to cast.”
“I called Robert. I said, "I think he’s the best kid. I’m going to cast him." He said, "Let me call him"...And when he came out of school, his cell phone rang and it was Robert Downey, Jr. calling saying, you’re going to be in Iron Man 3. And so it continued like that for the rest of the production. It was really great and they formed a nice bond. And it is a fun bond. Tony does not treat him like a kid...he doesn’t, you know, pat him on the head and treat him like a little boy necessarily. Which, I think little boys like when adults don’t treat them like that. So, we’ve screened it for a few audiences just in a normal test screening, and this relationship is ranked as one of the most surprising, unique and new things about the movie.”
With Ty Simpkins being considerably the first child actor with a full-fledged role in a Marvel Studios film, could Iron Man 3 have more family appeal? Despite the threequel’s inevitable PG-13 rating and intense, recent theatrical trailer, Kevin Feige offers:
“In terms of the marketing of this movie, if you go back and look at the marketing of Avengers, it promises a much darker movie than the movie actually is. The movie is much more fun than the trailer would show. Same thing with this. This trailer is--he’s being blown apart, his life is at stake, how will he get out of it? The movie is much, much more fun than that, but that’s what gets people into the audience. All of our movies are PG-13. I know parents who take their four-year-olds, and I know parents who won’t let their kids see them until they’re thirteen. So, that really depends on that. For us, there are things you can do if you are going by the letter of the law in a PG-13 movie...there’s a level of violence you can add, there’s a level of sexuality you can have, there’s a level of language you can have. We never go anywhere near the top of that. Because we don’t want to. Because that’s not what our characters are about. When you have the amount of fighting and explosions, and some blood on his nose when he puts the suit on, we do want that. We want it to be real. Otherwise, it’s just a CG thing hitting a CG person. So that’s why we’re always in that PG-13 range. But, Jon Favreau on the first two movies, Joss Whedon on the Avengers, myself--we have kids. We want to be able to take our kids to these movies and to enjoy them. It’s really the level of intensity that determines whether parents are comfortable taking their kids to it as opposed to content, necessarily.”
Marvel Studios’ “Iron Man 3” pits brash-but-brilliant industrialist Tony Stark/Iron Man against an enemy whose reach knows no bounds. When Stark finds his personal world destroyed at his enemy’s hands, he embarks on a harrowing quest to find those responsible. This journey, at every turn, will test his mettle. With his back against the wall, Stark is left to survive by his own devices, relying on his ingenuity and instincts to protect those closest to him. As he fights his way back, Stark discovers the answer to the question that has secretly haunted him: does the man make the suit or does the suit make the man? Starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Rebecca Hall, Stephanie Szostak, James Badge Dale with Jon Favreau and Ben Kingsley, “Iron Man 3” is directed by Shane Black from a screenplay by Drew Pearce & Shane Black and is based on Marvel’s iconic Super Hero Iron Man, who first appeared on the pages of “Tales of Suspense” (#39) in 1963 and had his solo comic book debut with “The Invincible Iron Man” (#1) in May of 1968. “Iron Man 3” is presented by Marvel Studios in association with Paramount Pictures & DMG Entertainment. Marvel Studios’ President Kevin Feige is producing & Jon Favreau, Louis D’Esposito, Stephen Broussard, Victoria Alonso, Alan Fine, Charles Newirth, Stan Lee & Dan Mintz are executive producers. The film hits May 3, 2013, and is distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Marvel Studios will also release “Thor: The Dark World ” on November 8, 2013; “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” on April 4, 2014; “Guardians of the Galaxy” on August 1, 2014; the sequel to “Marvel's The Avengers” on May 1, 2015; and “Ant-Man” on November 6, 2015!
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