Ter­rence Howard has revealed to Mil​i​tary​.com that film­ing for Iron man 2 will begin in March 2009.

The arti­cle goes into a lot of depth about Howard’s per­cep­tion of and expe­ri­ences with the Air Force as he pre­pared for his role as James Rhodes:

“The char­ac­ter of Colonel Rhodes reflects our war­rior ethos and the pro­fes­sion­al­ism that is so impor­tant to our Air Force cul­ture,” said Lt. Col. Stephen Clutter.

[…]

“As a civil­ian you have a ‘me men­tal­ity,’ but in the Air Force it’s a ‘we men­tal­ity.’ Mr. Howard said. “To get out of the ‘single-person place’ I’ve been in all my life, that’s a hard thing to do. To become an actor is more ego­cen­tric, so becom­ing part of a unit, an orga­ni­za­tion, was some­thing I’d never expe­ri­enced before.”

Philly​.com have pointed out that the Trans­form­ers II pro­duc­tion team will very soon be start­ing their work in and around Philadelphia,

Keep an eye out for Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Megan Fox and John Tur­turro over the next two weeks as Michael Bay puts Trans­form­ers 2: Revenge of the Fallen before the cam­eras in Philly, start­ing tomor­row. Among loca­tions: Peco [Philadel­phia Elec­tric Com­pany] plants along the Delaware, the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia (because LaBeouf plays a col­lege stu­dent), and East­ern State Pen­i­ten­tiary. Last week’s shoot­ing in Beth­le­hem, Pa., was a blast, as the old U.S. Steel plant hosted explo­sions and whirring Black Hawk helicopters.

Thanks to Robo­quaker, we have a sec­ond set of images from the Smith­son­ian National Air and Space Museum near Wash­ing­ton DC.

These pic­tures show a small radio con­trolled car, rumored to be “Wheels” given the call sheet descrip­tions which sug­gest Wheels is fairly small. (Can you imag­ine it as a toy!?)

UPDATE: High Res­o­lu­tion images added. Repro­duced under a cre­ative com­mons license.

SHH have posted up a sec­ond set report to go with this:

I’m back one last time with a report about what I saw filmed at the museum on Sat­ur­day. Some poten­tially spoi­ler­ish stuff will fol­low, so be aware.

I arrived around 10 and stayed until they broke for lunch (around 2, 2:30). Got to see a lot of stuff filmed, it was really quite inter­est­ing stuff. Shia, Megan Fox, and John Tur­turro were all on set.

All film­ing pretty much took place around the SR-71 Black­bird today. When I first got there, Michael Bay was being pushed on a cart with a cam­era film­ing an RC car, an RC mon­ster truck to be exact. It would roll past the side of the Black­bird and stop at the front. After sev­eral times doing this, Shia and Megan would then run and fol­low the RC truck along the plan to the front (Shia was hold­ing what I can only describe as a plas­tic spoon prob­a­bly stand­ing in for some­thing dig­i­tal later). When he got to the front he would hold it up to the nose of the plane.

Poten­tially big SPOILERS may be here in this next part, but the next bit filmed was John Tur­turro and that unknown actor in the green hoodie from yes­ter­day film­ing a scene fac­ing the front of the plane. After some flashes of light, Tur­turro freaks out and yells “Decep­ti­con! Get behind the MIG!”. So it’s offi­cial, the Black­bird is a Decep­ti­con, or at least that’s what the char­ac­ters think.

After that they took a long time set­ting up and film­ing the RC car rolling straight towards the nose of the plane and stop­ping. They then placed a two foot tall cutout of a robot (what the RC car will trans­form into) in its place and took some shots to get ref­er­ences for the FX team. And finally, they had the car roll towards the plane and stop, then Shia crawled into view and held up his “spoon” to the nose of the plane.

The last cou­ple of scenes I saw before the broke for lunch was a scene with Megan Fox. It was far away from where we were allowed to stand and I couldn’t hear any dia­logue but the tiny robot cut out was stand­ing off cam­era and she was look­ing down at it while talk­ing. And lastly, Shia stepped in the scene next to her and was yelling at some­one off cam­era (though again I couldn’t hear any dialogue).

Com­ing Soon had the oppor­tu­nity to speak exten­sively with Jon Favreau about the pos­si­ble plot lines in Iron Man 2. I though about para­phras­ing this, and sur­mis­ing, but it’s such a good read, chock full of infor­ma­tion and juicy good bits I have left it in full for you, with cer­tain bits highlighted:

CS/SHH!: Would you launch into another two year movie after this?
Favreau: Yeah, I would do it. Hope­fully we’ll fig­ure out how to get “Iron Man 2″ going and I’ll be involved with that. You have got to out-do what you did before. So, if the last one took two years, we would need at least that to do what we are talk­ing about, or at least think­ing about. Nobody knew about “Iron Man,” and that was a dis­ad­van­tage in some ways, but nobody expected any­thing. I think peo­ple were pleased based on the fact that they had no pre­con­cep­tions about the project. Now, we have a movie that peo­ple seem to like and you can’t give them less. You have to give them more. There are chal­lenges that come with that as well as the ben­e­fit of peo­ple already under­stand­ing who he is and the char­ac­ter. We told the ori­gin story so where do you go from here? There are plenty of story lines to explore from the 40 years of his­tory from that character.

CS/SHH!: Have you cho­sen any­thing?
Favreau: No, we haven’t. I haven’t been hired to do it yet. I know that Robert and I have talked a lot about what types of things we would like to do, and how to play into the strengths of what we dis­cov­ered last time around. I look for­ward to rolling up my sleeves. Hope­fully that won’t be too long in coming.

CS/SHH!: Kevin Feige said that he was pretty con­fi­dent that you guys would get some­thing going pretty quickly. Peter Billings­ley said the same thing as well.
Favreau: Yeah, Kevin is just a gem of a guy. He really walked the line very well of being the guy who is in charge of movies, and the stu­dio, as well as being my pro­ducer and some­body who over­saw the way that the source mate­r­ial was being dealt with. That is a lot of hats for a guy to wear. It was a fairly new posi­tion for him. I don’t think that he has ever had the respon­si­bil­ity he had on “Iron Man” before. I know that he has worked on “The Incred­i­ble Hulk” since then, but its great to have a mix of some­body who respects the source mate­r­ial and doesn’t just treat it like some­thing you can use or dis­card as you see fit, and was very sup­port­ive in get­ting us what we needed to make a good movie. The cast­ing of Robert, the visual effects bud­get, work­ing with the right ven­dors, but he had a very high stan­dard of qual­ity con­trol in the film. He was also very help­ful in help­ing me under­stand the genre, and what peo­ple expect from it, while still giv­ing Robert and I the room to have a very dif­fer­ent take on the mate­r­ial. We broke a lot of the rules that the genre nor­mally has. We have all been rewarded for tak­ing the chances that we did.

CS/SHH!: I know that Samuel L. Jack­son talked about expand­ing Nick Fury’s role for a sec­ond film.
Favreau: Oh, good.

CS/SHH!: So, it’s news to you?
Favreau: I’m not in the loop on that unfor­tu­nately. I think that Mar­vel has their hands full right now. They have another big movie com­ing out right now, with “The Incred­i­ble Hulk,” and that’s com­ing out in a cou­ple of weeks. I know from when I was in that posi­tion on “Iron Man” a lot of the heavy lift­ing for the stu­dio comes in at this stage in the game. They are part­ner­ing up with Uni­ver­sal try­ing to fig­ure out how to roll out the mar­ket­ing cam­paign for that, so a lot is rid­ing on that film. I know that they are done cre­atively work­ing on it, but that is only half the game, so I think right now it’s a small stu­dio. There are not a lot of peo­ple and I’m sure they have their hands full on that one. Hope­fully when the dust set­tles every­body will be ready to get their head in the game and try to make some more movies.

CS/SHH!: It’s obvi­ous that in “The Incred­i­ble Hulk” there is the super sol­dier serum and Cap­tain America’s shield in your film. So, is there a story there already with Cap­tain Amer­ica that you guys will put in?
Favreau: Yeah, truth be told it’s more like instinc­tively we are grav­i­tat­ing towards com­bin­ing cer­tain prop­er­ties, but you don’t really dis­cover how that hap­pens until you roll your sleeves up and get into the story telling. You do cast­ing. There are a lot of ideas float­ing around. We will have con­ver­sa­tions as we all gather and paw the ground in the park­ing lots. We’ll kick rocks around and start hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions where we let our imag­i­na­tions go wild. It’s not like we’ve sat down with a dry erase board and wrote through the whole line of sto­ries. For me I’m pretty con­fi­dent about who Iron Man is, what that char­ac­ter is, and what the rules of that world are. Maybe Mar­vel knows, but I have no idea how you relate that real­ity to the real­ity of Thor, which seems like a very dif­fer­ent set of rules to that uni­verse. Cap­tain Amer­ica I get, I under­stand how that would relate, or The Hulk. Espe­cially if you are work­ing towards the idea of doing “The Avengers,” how do you make those worlds all feel con­sis­tent with one another in the look of the film, the cast­ing of the film, and then the look of the visual effect.

CS/SHH!: I guess you will just have to direct all of them.
Favreau: [laughs] I would love to. Clearly I have stated that “The Avengers” would be fun. But I look at their release sched­ule and they have announced “Iron Man 2″ for 2010 and then “Avengers” for 2011. I know from expe­ri­ence there is no way I could. I don’t know what they have in mind, but there is no way that “The Avengers” could be done in a year. Either they are think­ing about some­body else doing it or they have some­thing up their sleeve that I don’t know. I know these movies take time to get right. I know that you have to have a good script. You have to under­stand where you are headed when you go into it, oth­er­wise you are rely­ing on blind luck and hard work. It’s good to have a game plan, espe­cially at this stage in the game, it’s impor­tant to under­stand where all of this is going. All of these prop­er­ties are work­ing together and I know Kevin has been very dili­gent about try­ing to keep a con­sis­tency. I will look for­ward to hav­ing these con­ver­sa­tions with the guys at Mar­vel, to lay­ing out all the puz­zle pieces and see­ing how they fit together.

CS/SHH!: 2010 is pretty soon if you think about it. Is it just an under­stand­ing with Robert, you, and every­one just knows it will be a five year thing and you launch into it?
Favreau: I don’t know how that works. I’ve never worked in that world before. I have never done a sequel to a film, nor have I in the past worked on any­thing where a sequel felt organic. I think it’s the nature of “Iron Man” because it comes from a seri­al­ized piece of source mate­r­ial, that it does lend itself to hav­ing sequels. It’s all new ground for me, it’s new ground for Mar­vel, although they have been part­nered up and done sequels with other stu­dios. There are a lot of dif­fer­ent approaches you could take. Hope­fully we end up going for a sequel that is going to be big­ger and bet­ter than the first one. That’s not always the case with sequels. Some­times you end up try­ing to do just rush, and hit a release date. Hope­fully this sequel will be dri­ven by the mate­r­ial and dri­ven by good ideas. I think that is what got Mar­vel the suc­cess that they have had as an inde­pen­dent stu­dio. I have no doubt that they are going to con­tinue with that phi­los­o­phy of let­ting the source mate­r­ial, and the qual­ity of the story, dic­tate all the other deci­sions. They are not shack­led down by what a nor­mal stu­dio, with a release sched­ule, has to con­tend with.

CS/SHH!: But the team is pretty much the same?
Favreau: I know that all the actors are def­i­nitely in active nego­ti­a­tions. All of that has been agreed to, which is really encour­ag­ing, because I think the cast was a big part of the suc­cess of that as much if not more than “Iron Man” the char­ac­ter. I think that as long as you got all those peo­ple together, and you have a solid take on the mate­r­ial, then I expect great things.

CS/SHH!: “Demon in a Bot­tle”?
Favreau: Yeah, I mean that one is def­i­nitely brought up a lot. How do you han­dle “Demon in a Bot­tle” and when does it come in? I think it hap­pened in the ‘80s, which was 20 years after the first “Tales of Sus­pense” so when do you play that card? When do you play the “Demon in a Bot­tle” card? We sort of tip our hat to it, and cer­tainly there is a lot to be mined there, but it’s all a puz­zle. How does it fit in? “Demon in a Bot­tle” also relates to War Machine and James Rhodes’s arc. What vil­lains are you deal­ing with and how much effort do you put into reveal­ing a whole set of char­ac­ters. We really spent most of the time deal­ing with Tony in this one, explain­ing who he is, and why he is the way that he is so that now Iron Man comes to life. You then have to reveal, I think, some heavy duty, heavy weight bad guys that you could then counter bal­ance this incred­i­bly pow­er­ful super hero.

CS/SHH!: You intro­duce The Ten Rings…
Favreau: We have The Ten Rings in there, but the Man­darin is still there. I’m glad that we didn’t try to attack the Man­darin the first time around. There is a lot that is very rel­e­vant about that char­ac­ter, in the pool of the land­scape that we find our­selves in, but there is some­thing off putting and dis­taste­ful about the way that the Man­darin had been pre­sented back in the ‘60s. I don’t think that is rel­e­vant any­more. How do you main­tain the core spirit of what makes that vil­lain so for­mi­da­ble with­out hav­ing some­thing that either seemed out of our real­ity, as far as what his abil­i­ties are, or the way he is depicted.

CS/SHH!: In “Demon in a Bot­tle” there weren’t really a lot of vil­lains. It was when Tony real­ized he wants to be Iron Man again, James was like, “I don’t think so.“
Favreau: So you have to cre­ate. I also want to see what other movies are doing. It seems that “Han­cock” is deal­ing with a lot of those issues too. The comic book fans might see “Demon in a Bot­tle” as a fresh story line but I haven’t seen “Han­cock” yet. From what I’ve seen it seems there is a lot of imagery that seems to be shared. Him fly­ing through bill­boards and things. The idea of the hero whose biggest enemy is him­self, and him fight­ing through his demons, you want to come at the audi­ence with some­thing fresh. You don’t want to feel like you are echo­ing some­thing that some­body else is doing. I think you have to look at the comics, look at what else Mar­vel is doing, but then you have to look at the land­scape of super­hero films. There are so many out there. I think that part of the rea­son that “Iron Man” was so suc­cess­ful was that we really chose to break new ground in a new area tonally, cast wise, the way we depict the hero, what his abil­i­ties are. It felt fresh in a genre that is begin­ning to feel stale if it’s not done with the proper amount of inspi­ra­tion and a strong voice or tone. I think as the sum­mer roles out, and I’m really curi­ous about “The Dark Knight” to be hon­est with you. That was this loom­ing pres­ence that we knew was going to be a great film. I have no doubt that it’s going to be phe­nom­e­nal. I think our big sav­ing grace was the fact that we had a cou­ple of months between that film and us and there was room for both of us. We weren’t fight­ing for shelf space. Even though we weren’t going head to head, it was very clear that we could not take this char­ac­ter that on paper could seem very sim­i­lar to Bat­man, and I have no doubt that just the incep­tion of “Iron Man” was a reac­tion to DC. It was def­i­nitely bor­rowed a lot from DC because here you have the bil­lion­aire bach­e­lor guy, who was strug­gling with inner con­flict, and he has no super pow­ers. He invents his own suit and his abil­i­ties come from him­self. He’s a self-made hero. We had to really steer clear of every­thing that “The Dark Knight” was doing. I have tremen­dous respect for their cast, for [Christo­pher] Nolan, and so I want to see what they do. I def­i­nitely don’t want to fight for the same ter­ri­tory as them. There is plenty of room to tell these sto­ries. As a fan I’m really look­ing for­ward to it and I have a lot of respect for the way they approach the mate­r­ial too. He has no sec­ond unit on his films. He does all the direct­ing him­self. If they are going to do some IMAX work then they shoot it in IMAX. He put together a cast in a way that broke ground for me to be able to use the cast that I did. They made sure the script was per­fect before they started shoot­ing it and that’s not typ­i­cal for all super­hero films. A lot of times they just throw them together and try to do them as inex­pen­sively as they can. They try to chase the poster and chase the date. They put a lot of care into that film. I’m look­ing for­ward to see how it pays off. From every­thing I’ve seen so far my hat is off to them. I look for­ward to check­ing that film out. I have some­thing to talk about, so that’s pretty kick ass.

Speak­ing at the Take Two investor’s con­fer­ence call, CEO Strauss Zel­nick revealed that the movie adap­ta­tion may be released along­side not the sec­ond (due for release Fall 2009), but third video game, which puts esti­mates at the end of 2010, maybe sum­mer 2011.

“It’‘s more likely that [the BioShock movie] would be released coin­ci­den­tally with BioShock 3″

Via Gamespot

The detailed, expan­sive and very dif­fi­cult to re-create envi­ron­ment of Rap­ture has stirred rumors that the film may fol­low a pro­duc­tion sim­i­lar to the highly suc­cess­ful 300 movie, using green screen technology,

The stu­dio hopes to bring the fallen aquatic utopia of Rap­ture to cel­lu­loid life through exten­sive use of green screen tech­nol­ogy, an approach not dis­sim­i­lar to Leg­endary Pic­tures’ inter­pre­ta­tion of 300.

— Joys­tiq

Vari­ety have con­firmed many Hol­ly­wood mur­mur­ings that a BioShock movie is, now offi­cially, in the works. Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios have picked up the video game adap­ta­tion with Gore Verbin­ski (Pirates of the Caribbean) set to direct. It is also thought that Last Samu­rai and Avi­a­tor screen­writer, John Logan, is cur­rently in talks.

The agree­ment between movie and game stu­dios has been struc­tured to avoid the col­lapse that the Halo movie adap­ta­tion fell to,

Take-Two exec­u­tive chair­man Strauss Zel­nick said the “state of the art” deal is struc­tured so that “Bioshock” won’t end up in turn­around like “Halo,” which is back with Microsoft.

“The rea­son I struc­tured it the way I did is to make sure it gets made,” he emphasized.

The arti­cle then pro­vides some back­ground to the agree­ment whilst imply­ing that the cre­ative minds involved hope to stay true to the game.

Take-Two has been approached by a num­ber of pro­duc­ers and stu­dios since the game came out in August but waited until it had swept most of the end-of-year indus­try awards and racked up impres­sive hol­i­day sales before work­ing with CAA to pack­age the project. Uni­ver­sal got a first look and made a pre­emp­tive bid.

[…]

“One of the things we decided early on is that we didn’t want to go through a pro­ducer,” he com­mented. “It’s ter­ri­bly impor­tant to us to have a mean­ing­ful influ­ence on how this project is pro­duced. We didn’t want any insu­la­tion between us.”

Verbin­ski noted that Rapture’s art deco design and visu­ally arrest­ing char­ac­ters, such as the mechan­i­cal Big Dad­dys who pro­tect genet­i­cally mutated girls called Lit­tle Sis­ters, par­tic­u­larly inspired him to see the game as a film.

Though no release date is even being tar­geted, Verbin­ski said he plans to start pre-production as soon as Logan’s script is fin­ished and approved by all involved.

Helmer has been reg­u­larly con­sult­ing with Ken Levine, the game’s cre­ative direc­tor, though it’s not yet clear if the game devel­oper will have a for­mal role in the film.

All in all, the signs look very good for an excit­ing and faith­ful video game adap­ta­tion, espe­cially with the tal­ents of Verbin­ski and Logan on board.

Quint from AICN had a chance to visit the Iron man pro­duc­tion offices, where he learned details of Iron man’s plot arc and cast­ing, orig­i­nally cho­sen to span a tril­ogy (isn’t every­thing these days?).

The biggest and best news is that this film is one of three. That’s right. Favreau is build­ing a three-film arc, with all the actors signed for all three of them. The impres­sion I got was that he’s going to make this first one fairly stand-alone, but con­tain­ing threads that will be con­tin­ued in future films, throw­ing in lit­tle hints at what’s to come, some set-ups that will pay off later in the story. I don’t know if screen­writ­ers Hawk Ostby, Mark Fergus(CHILDREN OF MEN), Matt Hol­lowway and Arthur Mar­cum are script­ing all three or just have a detailed out­line for the next cou­ple of movies, but I like that they’re already think­ing ahead.

This three pic­ture plan has been planned since the begin­ning and played a large role in cast­ing… I don’t know if it’ll be in the first film (I’m guess­ing not), but Jim Rhodes as played by Ter­rence Howard WILL be War Machine and that was a key fac­tor in cast­ing Howard. In fact, Favreau said he loved hear­ing the spec­u­la­tion when Howard was first rumored, peo­ple already accept­ing him as Tony Stark. He’s a great actor and a com­mand­ing one. He’ll be able play through the armor.