Talk about striking while the iron is hot: Just after Iron Man led the box office with a $104 million jackpot, Marvel Studios has announced no less than five more movies starring its roster of superheroes, reports the Associated Press.
Continuity geeks will notice a pattern, in that all five films focus on members of Marvel's all-star team, The Avengers. Besides the unsurprising news that billionaire playboy Tony Stark and his armor-clad alter ego will return for the sequel Iron Man 2 (slated for an April 2010 release), the other movies are Thor (June 2010), The First Avenger: Captain America (May 2011), The Avengers (July 2011), and Ant-Man (no set release date).
Iron Man was the first movie about a Marvel superhero that was financed by Marvel Studios itself, a move which will allow the company to share characters between movies the same way they appear in the comics. The Incredible Hulk, coming out June 13, will feature a cameo from Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, and it's possible the Hulk will appear in one or more of the upcoming movies as well, considering that the green giant was a founding member of the Avengers in the comics.
Iron Man included several hints about future Avengers movie developments: Tony Stark's California mansion is run by a computerized butler named Jarvis, which may indicate that Stark will donate the mansion for use as the Avengers home base as he did in the comics, since Jarvis is most well-known as the butler in the Avengers Mansion. And …
(SPOILER ALERT)
… in a post-credits sequence, Samuel L. Jackson appears as Col. Nick Fury to recruit Iron Man into the Avengers. The version of Fury in Marvel's Ultimate comics line was based on Jackson, so the casting is, of course, particularly appropriate.