I’ve started blog­ging this movie a lit­tle late in, sorry for that. I’ve been a tad busy get­ting mar­ried and so on. Where shall we begin? Prin­ci­ple pho­tog­ra­phy for the third Trans­form­ers movie started at the end of May, with a rumored bud­get of $200m. The Trans­form­ers 3 release date is cur­rently set to July 1st, 2011, likely to be in 3D — but that card­board cut-out con­verted 3D rather than an Avatar immer­sive 3D. A change from the pre­vi­ous two movies, Orci and Kurtz­man step out, and Ehren Kruger takes cen­tre stage as writer of the third part in the soon to be tril­ogy. As a tril­ogy, accord­ing to Bay, this will be the final part, “it really ends”.

Shoot­ing Locations

Shoot­ing in Wash­ing­ton DC, Chicago, Detroit and Moscow. Pos­si­bly also in Africa, China and Texas.

Plot

In inter­views, the film mak­ers have promised to include more char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and solid sto­ry­telling, parts of TF2 severely lacked in these depart­ments. Rather than all out robot car­nage, Michael Bay says this movie is shap­ing up to have a bit of mys­tery; rumors sug­gest that it’ll revolve around a Trans­form­ers link hid­den in the USA/USSR space race, involv­ing Sound­wave. Mean­while, Sam is grow­ing up and mov­ing on.

Cast­ing

The big story, Megan Fox is out, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is in — but not as Mikaela, her char­ac­ter is called Carly. New­com­ers also include Frances McDor­mand, John Malkovich and Alan Tudyk.

Shia LaBeouf — Sam Witwicky
Josh Duhamel — Cap­tain Lennox
Tyrese Gib­son — Mas­ter Sergeant Epps
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley — Carly
John Tur­turro — Agent Sim­mons
John Malkovich — Sam’s boss
Frances McDor­mand — National Intel­li­gence Direc­tor
Patrick Dempsey — Carly’s boss
Alan Tudyk

Trans­form­ers line up

Auto­bots
Opti­mus Prime
Bum­ble­bee –2011 Chevy Camaro
Ratchet — 2009 Hum­mer H3
Iron­hide — 2007 GMC Top­kick C4500
Skids — 2011 Chevy Sparks
Mud­flap — 2011 Chevy Sparks
Side­swipe — 2012 Chevy Corvette Centennial

Decep­ti­cons
Shock­wave
Mega­tron
Starscream — F-22 Rap­tor
Sound­wave — Satel­lite and Cybertron­ian jet

Unknown cars spot­ted on set include a Fer­rari 458 Italia and a blue 2011 Mer­cedes Benz E350, believed to be auto­bots. Three Nascar auto­mo­biles and a Chevy Tahoe vehi­cle have also been spot­ted, believed to be decepticons.

In March this year, Chris Evans was cast as Cap­tain America/Steve Rogers. We haven’t got our first images of him as Cap­tain Amer­ica just yet, but we do have some excel­lent con­cept and almost cer­tainly offi­cial art, orig­i­nally posted to AICN.

An early Christ­mas present for us! Apple has the exclu­sive Iron Man 2 trailer reveal, in full 1080p high def­i­n­i­tion.
Iron Man 2 trailer at Apple.

And of course, it’s also on YouTube, for those that pre­fer not to use Quick­time:

Screen­shots and analy­sis com­ing soon!

We’ve got our first big Iron Man 2 tease as an early Christ­mas present. A high res­o­lu­tion Iron Man 2 poster fea­tur­ing War Machine with right shoul­der mounted gun. As teaser posters go, this one’s pretty awesome.

We’ve also got a host of new screen­shots fea­tur­ing Tony Stark, Whiplash and Scar­lett Johans­son as the Black Widow.

As always, click on the images for their larger versions.

A sec­ond offi­cial Prince of Per­sia movie trailer has been released, this time it’s the inter­na­tional ver­sion. It is slightly dif­fer­ent with the odd new glimpse, although it doesn’t show Ben Kingsley.

Thanks to all those that sent this one in!

We’ll have an analy­sis for you shortly.

New toy pack­ag­ing and Iron Man 2 fig­ures have appeared online, the most excit­ing of these is a ‘Mark VI’ armor, seen below. Pic­tures come via Mar­velous News.

French TV sta­tion Canal have posted an extended 7 minute behind the scenes look at Iron Man 2. The video starts off in French but the inter­view with direc­tor Jon Favreau is in Eng­lish; you’ll here him talk about Stark’s home made par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor. There’s also an inter­view with Robert Downey Jr., talk­ing about the chal­lenges of film­ing a sequel. An insight­ful look at the Iron Man sequel and def­i­nitely worth the watch.