EXCLUSIVE! Hint…it’s Marvel-ous!

This is a Champagne Living first…leading off with a video! Watch it and you’ll IMMEDIATELY know why. If you DON’T watch it, you’re going to miss this EXCLUSIVE first look at the Iron Man 3 trailer. There are only about 2 dozen of us who were sent this to share, so if you’re an Iron Man or Marvel fan – ENJOY!

Continuing the journey to Oz, I took a little DETOUR while I was in Los Angeles to speak with Mr. Marvel himself…Kevin Feige. Here’s what HE had to say.

KF : I’m going to start off by showing you something that, when you all go back and see OZ, which I assume you will do and pay your hard earned money… In front of OZ is going to be the final payoff trailer to Iron Man 3. It’ll be online a week or so before that. Nobody’s seen it. It’s ninety-eight percent finished – unless it’s totally finished, it’s very close to being finished.

This is what is going to be unveiled on the world, uh, in a matter of weeks, and then again in front of OZ, and afterwards I’ll talk a little bit more on that. In coming off the heels of Avengers, we wanted to focus on Tony. Uh, seeing him with- with the Hulk and Iron Man, I’m sorry, and Thor, obviously was awesome and was our big event last Summer. This time we wanted to return to Tony’s world. His place in Malibu, which is why you see him with pepper. And we wanted to remind the audience, yes the suits are cool, but it’s his intellect that is really his super power.

And if you’ll remember the beginning of Iron Man 1, he’s in a cave. He doesn’t have access to anything, and he ends up building his first Iron Man suit. So what we wanted to do in this movie was put him in a similar position. Take away everything from Tony and see how he can fight the villain back. Now I’m going to show you a fun sequence today, that essentially is that moment. Things are going more or less swimmingly for Tony. He’s a little nervous. He’s got a little bit of anxiety after the events of the Avengers.

He’s been to outer space, he’s seen aliens, he’s seen green people, he’s seen guys with hammers, and he’s just a guy. So it sometimes worries him and he thinks maybe I can- maybe I’m only super if I’m in the suit. This movie is the movie that reminds him he’s super, even out of his suit. He just has to sort of figure that out. So I’m going to show you a sequence now where everything that Tony has, particularly this mansion, is destroyed. He’s got a barely working suit, and he finds himself investigating a mystery that we set up at the beginning of the movie.

We really wanted him to be fighting for his friends, for the love of his life, Pepper, who wants to see him in an are that he’s not. He’s comfortable in the Penthouses of Manhattan, in mansions in Malibu. Here he is in the middle of Tennessee with his hat pulled low and he’s trying to do this investigation. And this very sweet and funny relationship that he begins with this- this little boy. Again, reminding the audience he’s a superhero, he’s frankly our most famous superhero, all because he’s got a very intelligent, scientific mind. So here, a little sequence with the trials and tribulations with Tony.

KF :We auditioned lots and lots of kids and Tyson came in and was just a real kid. He could barely keep a straight face looking at Robert. He bonded with Robert completely. I called Robert, I said, I think he’s the best kid, I’m going to cast him. He said, let me call him. So I called his mom, and I said what time does he get out of school and what’s his cell phone? And when he came out of school, his cell phone rang and it was Robert Downey, Jr. calling saying, you’re going to be in Iron Man 3. And so it continued like that for the rest of the production. It was really great and they formed a nice bond.

Tony does not treat him like a kid necessarily. He goes on in this scene and he doesn’t  pat him on the head and treat him like a little boy necessarily. Which I think little boys like when adults don’t treat them like that. So we’ve screened it for a few audiences just in a normal test screening, and this relationship is ranked as one of the most surprising, and unique, and new things about the movie, which was exciting because it was one of the scary things.

Q : I have a question. When he’s working with the little boy Ty, right…

KF : The character’s name is Harley.

Q : Harley. Do you see a lot of smart-aleckness of Tony Stark in him, with the little boy, or did you soften it up and you miss some of that?

KF : No. He is quite the smart-aleck with- with the little boy,  and the boy is shocked at first, and then slowly begins to sort of give as good as he gets from Tony. So that certainly continues.

Q : Women and action movies are not necessarily words that are synonymous, but Marvel has really done a good job of getting women interested. Avengers was something women were really drawn to. How much though do you put into bringing the female audience in?

KF : We want these movies to play for everyone. We think they are for everyone, and I don’t know that we necessarily sit down and go, how do we make men like this movie? How do we make women like this movie? We don’t do that, but part of what we love about our characters is that they’re human, they’re flawed. They react even with aliens coming at them and armored suits flying at them and villains shooting rays at them. The way they respond to those situations, we try to make it as emotionally truthful as possible.

He’s been with the same woman the whole time, and the relationship just grows. The relationship gets deeper and deeper. In this film they live together. You saw a little bit of the banter with Rebecca Hall who plays a new character, Maya. But the truth of the matter is, the love triangle in this movie is really between Tony, Pepper and the suits. Tony, Pepper and his obsession with those suits, and the obsession with technology. It’s sort of unique for a big superhero Summer blockbuster franchise to have, I think, that kind of- of- of layers.

And that really is…yes there’s a bad guy, yes the stakes are very, very high, the President of the United States is in danger, but the real stakes are, is Tony going to be able to set aside the obsession to spend all day, every day in that workshop, tinkering with the suits in order to focus on, as he says in the trailer, the one thing that matters most – Pepper, and that actually is what the entire movie’s about.

As we lead into the finale, yes he has to save the world, but it’s really about, about the relationship between those two. Which was not the case with James Bond or Indiana Jones or pick your, you know, leading male hero. So I think  that’s unique, but that’s also what it is in the comics, and that’s what we want to bring to life on the screen.

Q : Can you talk about Marvel working with Disney?

KF : Well, I’ll tell you a few things. One is, I’m obsessed with Disney and with Disney theme parks, and when I was first told by the heads of Marvel – what do you think of Disney? We’re thinking of selling the company. I pulled out my wallet, I got  the annual pass, the Disney DVC membership, all of that stuff,  because I was just obsessed with it. That’s what my family did, was go to the Disney theme parks every year, and still do, over New Years down in Florida.

So I sort of loved that, and I thought it was great, but I thought…and I understood why they wanted us, because they didn’t have,  things for boys  and for that market. They were very great in early meetings we had with them. They said, like Pixar, we like what you’re doing. We want you to keep doing what you’re doing. That was two years ago now – two or three years ago, and that has certainly held true. They’ve let us make the movies we want to make the way we make them.

Avengers is the perfect example of what they can tap into. Groups like yourselves. All of the marketing that they bring to it. The passion that they bring to it. They did a spectacular job with marketing The Avengers. And tapping into everything that a company as huge as Disney can do. But, at the same time, what I love most about them is, despite it being the biggest entertainment conglomerate on earth, it’s Disney, and it can be very personal.

Q : As a mother of two teenagers, I appreciate you’re having a positive role model, as far as modeling relationships. Is that something you intended from the beginning?

KF : Well, you know, Tony, Pepper, was always the most important relationship to Tony Stark in the comics. That’s not always true with,  Clark Kent has Lois Lane, right. That said, a lot of the other characters don’t have that. The Marvel characters sort of do. Thor has the Natalie Portman character who continues into the next Thor film. We do pull it all from the comics and that is what  it was. It really was fun to us in the beginning of Iron Man 1.

He goes to Vegas, he sleeps with a reporter, to sort of set up that, so that the relationship with Pepper, there’s a flashback at the beginning of this movie with the Rebecca Hall character that shows what he was like many years ago, before he became Iron Man. You see a little bit of that playboy. But, the fact is, you always want to remind audiences of that side of him, so you can appreciate how, sort of mature he’s getting. That he’s putting all that aside to be with her. The other thing is, the chemistry between Robert and Gwyneth is spectacular

Q : Avengers was marketed towards families, this one seems a little more intense. How do you perceive the marketing?

KF : Well, all of our movies are PG-13. I know parents who take their four year olds, and I know parents who won’t let their kids see them until they’re thirteen. For us, there are things you can do if you are going by the letter of the law in a PG-13 movie. There’s a level of violence you can add, there’s a level of sexuality you can have, there’s a level of language you can have. We never go anywhere near that, top of that. Because we don’t want to. Because that’s not what our characters are about.

For more information on IRON MAN 3:

• “Like” IRON MAN 3 on Facebook 
• “Follow” IRON MAN 3 on Twitter
• Visit the website: http://marvel.com/ironman3

 IRON MAN 3 releases in theaters on May 3rd!

This post was facilitated as a result of a press junket. All opinions are strictly my own.