I’m quite enjoy­ing Favreau’s twit­ter­ing, it gives me that strange per­sonal win­dow into the Iron Man 2 pro­duc­tion cycle. Recent tweets of note to Iron Man followers,

Rehearsed today with Gwyneth. She looks ripped. I gotta read GOOP and see what the hell she’s eating.

Great rehearsal today with Gwyneth, RDJ [Robert Downey Jr.] and Don Cheadle.

Rehearsed today with Mr. Rock­well. http://​twit​pic​.com/​2​h​f93

Sam Rock­well is play­ing the multi-billionaire vil­lain Justin Ham­mer:

MTV caught up with Quan­tum of Solace direc­tor Marc Forster to ask him about Bond 23:

“They asked me if I wanted to […] I’ll never say never again, but at this point I would say no.”

As for what he would like to see in the next Bond movie, Forster added:

“It really depends on what direc­tion they want to take it. […] For me, I wanted to take it to a harder and darker place, but now that that jour­ney I’ve gone on has suc­ceeded, I feel like the next one can take it to a bit more humor­ous place again.”

“I feel like next time you should take it in a lighter and more humor­ous way, maybe add a few more girls and a bit more sex – all that kind of stuff […] I think that would be inter­est­ing.”

Speak­ing in the UK’s Metro news­pa­per, Daniel Craig briefly com­mented on the sched­ule for Bond 23:

‘[Dame Judi] is great. I’m sure she will be back when we get rolling again next year.’

When in 2010 we don’t know, not really help­ing us guess the next release date. Mean­while Michael G Wil­son com­mented at the Brad­ford Inter­na­tional Film Fes­ti­val that no fur­ther, sig­nif­i­cant work on Bond 23 has yet taken place:

The only news Wil­son broke about the next Bond film is that there is no news at all. He said there had been no sig­nif­i­cant work done on the next entry.

TF08 have posted their sec­ond batch of images for the week, this time show­ing Skids and Mega­tron in their boxes, along­side the new blue motor­cy­cle char­ac­ter, ‘Chro­mia’.

The packet describes Chromia’s char­ac­ter as a female friend of Iron­hide (part­ners — aka a love inter­est) with sis­ters, pre­sum­ably two given the three dif­fer­ent bikes. This char­ac­ter pro­file matches the out­line of Chro­mia given on Wikipedia based on the first gen­er­a­tion ani­mated series in the episode, “The Search for Alpha Trion.”. There appears to be no men­tion of Chro­mia com­bin­ing with any other robot/toys to form what was thought would be Arcee.

Chro­mia is tough as nails, and always spoil­ing for a fight. She’s […] friends with Iron­hide for cen­turies, and their reunion on Earth […] one of the high points of the war for both of them. Now they […] side-by-side, hunt­ing and destroy­ing Decep­ti­cons. nei­ther of […] has ever been hap­pier. The two robots make great part­ners, and […] along with her sis­ters, are an invalu­able part of the […].

As seen in the trailer:

TF08 have posted some new shots of Bar­ri­cade and Bum­ble­bee Revenge of the Fallen toys in vehi­cle mode with their weapons out. Bar­ri­cades involve­ment in the movie is largely unknown, although the car has been spot­ted on set.

This month Megan Fox appears very strik­ingly on the front cover of Empire, sport­ing an auto­bot tat­too on her left shoul­der — this is a photo-editing job, she doesn’t love robots that much.

Details on this month’s edi­tion, noth­ing too inter­est­ing on TF2 front:

The new issue of Empire is poised to hit shelves, and it’s a doozy. Our cover star is Trans­form­ers 2’s aptly-named Megan Fox, lead­ing the col­lec­tion of the hottest upcom­ing stars in Hol­ly­wood today. But that’s not all in this month’s issue.

The orig­i­nal image (via Seib­ertron):

A plot syn­op­sis and the first chap­ter of Alan Dean Foster’s Trans­form­ers novel enti­tled “Trans­form­ers: The Veiled Threat” have been posted to Del­rey Online.

The book can be pre­ordered on Ama­zon.

The descrip­tion of the book reveals the mean­ing of the NEST acronym seen on the Iron­hide toys, on the leaked call sheet and some vehi­cles on set (Hum­mers) — it sat­nds for the some­what cheesy — “Net­worked Ele­ments: Sup­port­ers and Transformers”.

Life on earth has changed for­ever as humans and their coura­geous robotic allies, the Auto­bots, must work together to pro­tect the planet from the destruc­tive forces of the evil Decep­ti­cons. At the head­quar­ters of NEST (Net­worked Ele­ments: Sup­port­ers and Trans­form­ers), tech sergeant Epps and cap­tain Lennox both guard and assist cyber­neti­cist Yoki Ishi­hara and the brood­ing Russ­ian AI genius Petr Ivanov as they explore the dif­fer­ences between organ­ics and bots. In the mean­time, all around them, alliances fray, dis­trust grows, sus­pi­cions mount, and trai­tors come out of the shadows.

Opti­mus Prime, the pow­er­ful leader of the Auto­bots who is also part of NEST, is on the defense as bat­tles flare up from Aus­tralia to Zim­babwe. But esca­lat­ing Decep­ti­con attacks will cul­mi­nate in a final con­fronta­tion from which no one–man or machine–will emerge unscathed.

Via TLAMB

Roberto Orci has answered another round of fan’s ques­tions over at TFW2005 — answers are often vague, cryp­tic or one-liners, but a num­ber of answers are inter­est­ing. The new set of answers start around page 226 of the thread (all Orci posts — need to be logged in).

Some of the high­lights are listed below, as col­lated by TLAMB:

Will Barricade’s dis­ap­pear­ance be explained in ROTF?
Explained is a very spe­cific kinda word… implied may be more like it

Will you guys seri­ously rethink about stay­ing on?
Time for fresh blood!

Just to be clear, what is your rea­son for not writ­ing it? If the other main play­ers comes back and they don’t see a need for fresh blood, then why would you?
Not clear who is com­ing back yet, but the main rea­son we would move on is because we risk get­ting stale and com­fort­able. If you only sing one song for too long, you miss the oppor­tu­nity to sing news songs. We’ll see.

who thought of the name for the movie? you, michael bay, alex, or some­one else?
Alex.

how many fans do you think saw past Michael’s “no Mega­tron” announce­ment? And sec­ond, is he aware that his com­ment about Megs only appear­ing in a flash­back kind of con­tra­dicts Hugo Weaving’s hint that the Allspark shard has some­thing to do with Megatron’s res­ur­rec­tion?
god love him

Did the fallen enslave the Egyp­tians to build the pyra­mids (which actu­ally are space bridges)?
Hmm. Get­ting warm

Did the Egyp­tians seal the fallen within his own design?
Also very warm but not quite.

Did you ever intend for Black­out and Brawl to speak?
Yes.

Would you con­sider a giant bat­tle in the Grand Canyon?
We actu­ally had a giant bat­tle in the Grand Canyon in the very first draft of the first movie.

Is there really still time to add stuff and how much stuff can be added at this point?
On the first movie, we were re-writing dia­logue until about 2 weeks before release!

can you let us know how many Auto­bots can fly in the movie?
very few

I know very early in devel­op­ment Mike Bay said that there would be a geri­atric robot. Was it already set there and then that Jet­fre would be that bot, or did you and the writers/Bay decide later that Jet­fire would suit that type of char­ac­ter?
We decided Jet­fire would fit after the idea came up to have a geri­atric robot.

Would you con­sider this movie the “Empire Strikes Back” of the Trans­former movie line (dark, feel­ing of hope­less­ness, crazy reveal/twists/turns)?
yes

Bay men­tioned in pass­ing that about 40 bots are in the movie. Sound about right or less/more?
sounds about right

Will The Fallen have any dia­logue?
Yes.

Can you name the 3 scenes that were filmed in IMAX for­mat?
Yes.

Will Prime sur­vive the movie?
Prime’s spirit can never die.

which of the 2 movies was more dif­fi­cult to get along with the story.
Movie 1 was the hard­est thing have ever worked on. Period. Nobody could imag­ine what it was, every­one thought it was just a silly car­toon or a toy com­mer­cial, the stu­dio wasn’t sure if the robots should talk, we had to come up with a story that would attract some­one like Bay, and we had bud­getary con­straints that made it nec­es­sary to gen­er­ate a sig­nif­i­cant human story which was coun­ter­in­tu­itive to some Trans­fans. By the sec­ond movie, the par­a­digm of the fran­chise was clear.

what are your feel­ings towards the idea of Leonard Nimoy doing the voice of the Fallen?
Would love it. I actu­ally talked to him about it, given the odd coin­ci­dence that he is Michael Bay’s cousin through mar­riage, but fan out­cry has also put Welker in the running.