Posted on 05/04/2008 10:33:44 AM PDT by maquiladora
"Iron Man" was pure gold at the box office.
The Marvel Comics adaptation, starring Robert Downey Jr. as the guy in the metal suit, hauled in $100.7 million over opening weekend and $104.2 million since debuting Thursday night, the second-best premiere ever for a non-sequel, according to studio estimates Sunday.
The film also scored overseas with $96.7 million in 57 countries where it began opening Wednesday, putting its worldwide total at $201 million.
Distributed by Paramount, "Iron Man" was the first release by Marvel Studios, which has begun financing its own productions after such studio-backed hits as the "Spider-Man,""X-Men" and "Fantastic Four" flicks.
"We could not have hoped for a better way for Marvel Studios to blast off," said David Maisel, chairman of the unit, a division of Marvel Entertainment, which stands to pull in a greater share of box-office receipts and merchandising money by financing movies itself.
Debuting in second-place with $15.5 million was Sony's romantic comedy "Made of Honor," starring "Grey's Anatomy" heartthrob Patrick Dempsey as a man who tries to woo his best pal after she asks him to be "maid of honor" at her wedding.
With rave reviews from many critics, "Iron Man" features Downey as billionaire arms designer Tony Stark, a boozy womanizer who builds a high-tech suit and becomes a superhero, mending his ways after he's taken captive and sees firsthand the devastation his weapons cause.
Directed by Jon Favreau, the film also stars Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges and Terrence Howard.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
gosh the trailers must be misleading, It looks like he's taking on the jihadists after the capture him in Afghanistan.
After suggesting either ‘Iron Man’ or ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’, we ended up at the very adolecent and forgettable, latter film.
If watching “adults” behave as 13 year olds is entertaining to you, feel free to dismiss my review.
It contains a lot of very uncomfortable, sexual, “comedy”.
Well the mending his ways part deals with his companies selling to both terrorists and America, in no ways was the movie ,that I could see, being anti-American, anti-Military or even anti-war. If anything it was anti-double dealing corporate greed.
Agreed. I felt it wasn’t anti-government or anti-military. In fact, the gov’t guys were out to help him in the end.
Spoiler: it didn’t portray the weapons as bad, it portrayed the weapons being sold to the “wrong people” as a bad thing (there was a bad guy who was, unbeknownst to everyone else, selling the weapons to the terror group.)
Sorry, I thought Forgetting Sarah Marshall kicked Iron Man’s keister. I found it pretty witty, and yes, uncomfortably funny.
Iron Man is just another action movie with a few special effects. It’s definitely summer time.
"I have a really interesting political point of view, and it's not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can't go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal," he said.
If you see it, be sure to stick around through the credits of the final scene after the credits complete. Tony Stark walks into his house and Nick Fury, boss of SHIELD (played by Laurence Fishburne) is waiting there to talk to him about getting involved in the "Avengers Project"
That's probably true, but I go to movies for escapism, not philosophy. I kind of like to watch a movie where they get the plot out of the way in the first ten minutes, and spend the rest of the time blowing stuff up. Iron Man looked like it was heavily influenced by the Transformers movie.
As a comics buff, I liked the old original Iron Man better than the gold and red later version. The old costume looked like an actual suit of armor, the new just looks like a super hero costume.
They apparently pay homage to the old versions in the movie:
I don’t know, it sounds like a typical lefty theme to me. Greedy corporations not caring about the common good, chasing the buck and selling out America by selling to the bad guys. Are you sure there wasn’t an anti-corporate overtone there?
It should be a great movie. Marvel directly producing it should make their movies even truer to the comic books.
I’ll look forward to the DVD release.
The film previews that I have seen seem to indicate that the film is true to the actual comic book introduction (updated) which I remember fondly.
Glad to see Downey having some success.
Another tiresome telling of “Business Is Evil!” movies with some good eye candy. John Hurt is completely wasted. Downey does well off the sauce. The story is especially laughable for its completely ignoring such basic forces as inertia, aerodynamics, and gravity.
Another tiresome telling of “Business Is Evil!” movies with some good eye candy. John Hurt is completely wasted. Downey does well off the sauce. The story is especially laughable for its completely ignoring such basic forces as inertia, aerodynamics, and gravity.
“it portrayed the weapons being sold to the wrong people”
EXACTLY. Nuanced liberals believe there is no such thing as weapons falling into the wrong hands.
Yeah, but Iron Man predated Star Wars by over ten years, and the second series by something like thirty years. Lucas never had an original thought in his life, except for JarJar Binks and the Ewoks, and we saw how those turned out. Much of the story line for the first three episodes of Star Wars was ripped from Kirby’s New Gods comics, and Darth Vader was such a blatant rip off of Doctor Doom that Marvel had to recreate the character for the Fantastic Four movie.
Later
This looks like an exact copy of the animated version that came out a year or so ago.
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