Iron Man 3 is, unequivocally, a movie — and, as we all know, it exists. Marvel's 2013 threequel marked the second collaboration between eponymous playboy and philanthropist Robert Downey Jr. and Shane Black, having first come together on 2005's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (also a movie, but one deserving of more generous adjectives), a comedy crime movie which took on the hardboiled literary genre with a tongue-in-cheek twist. Now, the two are reportedly set to come back together for a yet-to-be-determined film, according to the What I'm Hearing newsletter.
Details are sparse, but the movie apparently tackles the mononymous Parker, a fictional thief created by author Donald E. Westlake. He's the protagonist of 24 out of 28 novels written by Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark (fittingly), and whose stories have been adapted to the screen many times already. Parker has inspired roles played by the likes of Lee Marvin (Point Blank), Jim Brown (The Split), Robert Duvall (The Outfit), Peter Coyote (Slayground), Mel Gibson (Payback, and Jason Statham (the aptly titled Parker).
Black has written the new film to direct for Amazon Studios, and Downey Jr. is set to star as Parker. Such a nefarious role certainly feels against type for Downey Jr., whose theatrical projects over the last decade are almost exclusively made up of his appearances as Tony Stark in the Marvel movies and his ill-received post-MCU turn as Dr. Dolittle (in Dolittle). But maybe such a challenging preposition can bring the A-lister back into the popular limelight — it's without question that his is a name that will still put butts on cinema seats. And he's been out of the blockbuster game for a long 'ol while now.
Black, on the other hand, has been a little busier since Iron Man 3 (which, we remind you, is a movie which exists, and not the strange product of one of your post-Christmas fever dreams): his 2016 action comedy The Nice Guys was a hit among audiences and critics alike, scoring a slew of award nominations (albeit none of the big ones, sans a Critics' Choice Award here-and-there). 2018's action-horror franchise installment The Predator, which pit the likes of Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay and Keegan-Michael Key against a super-fied variant of the titular alien warrior with a shoulder cannon, was worse received but still doubled its reported $80 million budget.
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