After sev­eral rounds of cast­ing rumors that fea­tured Bradley Cooper, Chris Pine and Ryan Gosling, we have the semi-official announce­ment that Ryan Reynolds (The Pro­posal, Wolver­ine) is Hal Jordan.

Appar­ently Reynolds, who looks the part, screen tested along­side Bradley Cooper and Jared Leto, but the deci­sion between the three proved dif­fi­cult with direc­tor Mar­tin Camp­bell, pro­ducer Don­ald De Line and the stu­dio each hav­ing dif­fer­ent favorites.

We pre­vi­ously reported that shoot­ing would begin as early as Sep­tem­ber this year, it seems this has been pushed back to Jan­u­ary 2010, though still plan­ning on main­tain­ing the announced June 17th 2011 release date. The bud­get hasn’t yet been final­ized but is believed to be around $150m, the movie is set to film in Syd­ney, Australia.

A fan made image

This is fan art cre­ated by Josh MC. This is not real, it is fan art!

Thanks Greg!

We’ve seen Tony Stark and Whiplash in Iron Man 2, now’s our first look at the next major new char­ac­ter, the Black Widow (also known as the Russ­ian spy Natasha Romanoff), played by Scar­lett Johans­son. These shots come cour­te­ous of EW and Leroy.

Plot details

The arti­cle also offers up some very inter­est­ing plot details.

As we already know, Sam Rock­well is play­ing the weapons man­u­fac­turer Justin Ham­mer, “who fan­cies him­self the next Tony Stark”. Rourke plays the new vil­lain Whiplash, aka Russ­ian crim­i­nal Vanko — Vanko cre­ates his first suit whilst impris­oned, his final suit fires “dev­as­tat­ing, whip-like beams.”

Whiplash and Ham­mer join forces to take on Iron Man. Mean­while Natasha Romanoff is hired as Stark’s assis­tant (to replace Pep­per Potts, now CEO of Stark Indus­tries). This ulti­mately leads to roman­tic tensions.

Rourke also reveals that his char­ac­ter enjoys talk­ing to a cock­a­too whilst drunk.

Via Jon Favreau’s twit­ter feed and “Road & Track”, we’ve got a pic­ture of Tony Stark’s Grand prix racer. This will form part of the Monaco action scene, which pre­sum­ably also fea­tures Whiplash (Mickey Rourke). We’ve pre­vi­ously seen set pic­tures from Downey Stu­dios, Cal­i­for­nia, which show a replica Monaco race­track being built. Astute fans have also noticed the shape of the Mon­cao GP track on Tony Stark’s com­puter screen in the first offi­cially released Iron Man 2 image.

RT @ironmanarmory: @Jon_Favreau I see Road & Track has pics up of Stark’s GP racer. http://​bit​.ly/​S​a​3Qh