Marvel Round-Up: Shane Black Tapped to Direct ‘Iron Man 3,’ Plus a New, Much Better ‘Thor’ Trailer

A BIG day for Marvel fans. First comes the news (via Deadline) that Shane Black, director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and writer of all the Lethal Weapon movies has been tapped by Marvel execs to direct Iron Man 3. Unfortunate news that Jon Favreau won’t be returning to finish his trilogy, but apparently the director grew tired of the property and has now moved on to direct Magic Kingdom for Disney.

No word at who will be penning the script for IM3, as sources told Deadline that it’s “not figured out yet.” But looking at Black’s previous writing credits, it seems fitting that Marvel would give him the chance to make an auteur version of the last installment in the franchise. While it may be somewhat of sad news for Robert Downey Jr. that he won’t be re-teaming with Favreau again, it must be comforting for the actor to be working with someone who he has an established relationship with -  as RDJ was the lead in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. As a lot of the details of this deal are not yet hammered out, the question of how The Avengers storyline intersecting with IM3 is still up in the air. Stay tuned for more updates on that.

Now on to some more exiting news with the debut of the new Thor trailer on Yahoo! (via Slashfilm) – which I’m pleasantly surprised to say looks pretty badass. As I stated a couple weeks ago when we posted the Thor Super Bowl TV spot, until this point I have been skeptical of this particular Marvel adaptation. But after seeing this latest trailer, I’m glad to say that it has leaped Captain America and Green Lantern (obvi) to become my most-anticipated comic-book movie of the year. It looks awesome. Check out the trailer below. Thor hits theaters on May 6th.

What do you think about Shane Black directing Iron Man 3? And that Thor trailer looks pretty sweet, doesn’t’ it?