New toy pack­ag­ing and Iron Man 2 fig­ures have appeared online, the most excit­ing of these is a ‘Mark VI’ armor, seen below. Pic­tures come via Mar­velous News.

French TV sta­tion Canal have posted an extended 7 minute behind the scenes look at Iron Man 2. The video starts off in French but the inter­view with direc­tor Jon Favreau is in Eng­lish; you’ll here him talk about Stark’s home made par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor. There’s also an inter­view with Robert Downey Jr., talk­ing about the chal­lenges of film­ing a sequel. An insight­ful look at the Iron Man sequel and def­i­nitely worth the watch.

In a Ger­man GQ inter­view with Matthias Schweighöfer (Valkyrie), the actor report­edly (we haven’t seen a copy of the issue and the news hasn’t been pub­lished online) announced he’s in the run­ning for a role in Thor, whilst reveal­ing that Robert De Niro and Jude Law have also been cast. The rumor was orig­i­nally posted to AICN.

I’ve clas­si­fied this as rumor for now, there’s no hard proof and the arti­cle might well have been mis­trans­lated. How­ever, both Law and De Niro have worked with Thor direc­tor Ken­neth Branagh in the past, which gives some cre­dence to the claims.

Which char­ac­ters would these actors play?

In other cast­ing news, Stan Lee has con­firmed to Col­lider that he’ll be tak­ing up his cameo role for Thor, though he doesn’t yet know the details.

From the bumpy golf buggy, Jon Favreau shared some Avengers infor­ma­tion with MTV. First up, he will not be direct­ing The Avengers movie. Sec­ondly, Ed Nor­ton will not have a cameo appear­ance in Iron Man 2.

“We want to rein­force a lot of the stuff we started to tip off,” Favreau told MTV News. “‘The Avengers’ is a much larger con­cern for Mar­vel and Kevin Feige, who runs Mar­vel. They’re going to be doing ‘Thor’ and ‘Cap­tain Amer­ica,’ and the way we might start to tease those things in this movie, some of it is stuff that we’ve dis­cussed [and] some of the stuff you do last-minute as you fig­ure out how that stuff is com­ing together.”

“It’s an evolv­ing, amor­phous thing,” he explained. “If we decide and com­mit too early, the secret always gets out.”

“They’ll have to [find a dif­fer­ent direc­tor], because I’m not going to be avail­able,” he explained. “It’s some­thing I’m being the exec­u­tive pro­ducer on, so I’ll def­i­nitely have input and a say.”

“It’s going to be hard, because I was so involved in cre­at­ing the world of Iron Man and Iron Man is very much a tech-based hero, and then with ‘Avengers’ you’re going to be intro­duc­ing some super­nat­ural aspects because of Thor,” he con­tin­ued. “How you mix the two of those works very well in the comic books, but it’s going to take a lot of thought­ful­ness to make that all work and not blow the real­ity that we’ve created.”

“That’s why it’s good that you have the guys from Mar­vel like Kevin Feige, who knows the books well and has been involved with the mak­ing of all the movies, and he’ll be very involved with ‘Thor’ and ‘Cap,’” said Favreau. “You need some­body who has the per­spec­tive of all the dif­fer­ent fran­chises to bring them together. I have the myopic vision of just know­ing and lov­ing Iron Man.“

This opens up the ques­tion, who should direct the Avengers movie?

In talks with MTV, Sam Raimi has revealed that “Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan” writer Robert Rodat will be pen­ning the World of War­craft movie adap­ta­tion. The sto­ry­line will be an orig­i­nal effort, set in the War­craft uni­verse but not fol­low­ing the Lich King book (which had been rumored as a subtitle).

“We would choose… some­thing that encom­passes lands and char­ac­ters and sto­ry­lines, and we would be true to it. But our story may or may not be about one of those cen­tral characters.”

“We want to be really faith­ful to the game. We would have our writer, Robert Rodat, really craft an orig­i­nal story within that world that feels like a ‘World of War­Craft’ adven­ture. Only obvi­ously it’s very dif­fer­ent ’cause it’s expanded and trans­lated into the world of a motion picture.”

“[The hope is to prop­erly cap­ture] the Horde and the Alliance and the mythol­ogy that takes place in the game, and the arche­types that the game presents. I think we would try and find touch­stones within the game to make it accu­rate and true and choose one or some of the lands that are por­trayed in the game with as much accu­racy and authen­tic­ity as possible.”

Speak­ing with MTV, Sam Raimi gave some Spider-man 4 updates, reveal­ing that the script is cur­rently under­go­ing some small rewrites whilst pro­duc­tion is prepar­ing for a March 2010 start, aim­ing for a May 6th 2011 release date. Cast­ing hasn’t started yet, but it is set to get under-way shortly.

We’re hop­ing that it’s the first week in March,

At the moment, pre-production is in full swing, even as screen­writer Gary Ross con­tin­ues to work on the script.

He’s work­ing on a draft, I just gave him some notes and he’s doing a rewrite right now.

The pro­duc­tion is start­ing to come together. I’ve got a pro­duc­tion designer who is start­ing to design the sets and the envi­ron­ments that the pic­ture will take place in. We just brought aboard Scott Stokdyk as one of the two visual effects super­vi­sors, and I worked with him on all three ‘Spider-man’ pictures.

None of the cast­ing has really taken place, but we’re start­ing to think about that now.

Spoil­erTV has posted a cast­ing call for the Thor movie, ask­ing for

[WARRIORS] A fear­less war­rior race, where size, strength and feroc­ity define a member’s rank in both the social and mil­i­tary hier­ar­chy. War­riors born in this soci­ety face the harsh­est eco­log­i­cal con­di­tions imag­in­able and thrive in envi­ron­ments where lesser crea­tures, includ­ing humans, quickly per­ishes. Theirs is a world cre­ated to cull weak­ness from the uni­verse to ensure their supreme sov­er­eignty spreads across the stars. MUST BE 6’2 OR TALLER sptv050769, NO BODYBUILDER TYPES. SAG ROLE BUT NO LINES. MUST BE COMFORTABLE WEARING PROSTHETICS.

Cin­e­mat­i­cal spec­u­late that this is a cast­ing call for the Skrulls,

You can’t really get any more mil­i­taris­tic and con­quest dri­ven than these guys, and one def­i­nitely needs pros­thet­ics to pull them off. But what the heck would Skrulls be doing in Thor? Even Loki hasn’t had much to do with those creeps until recently. The obvi­ous answer would be to have them come in and set up The Avengers, but with two vil­lains and two love inter­ests, you’d think there was enough crazy to go around. Any­one out there have a bet­ter guess as to who our prosthetic-heavy war­riors might be?

Fans have also sug­gested they could be the Kree, a war­rior race that have reached their evo­lu­tion­ary peak or Frost Giants. How­ever, another right­fully points out, it is likely they will just be Asgar­dian extras.

Ernie Hud­son, now 63, has been speak­ing with IESB about movies, act­ing and his thoughts on the third Ghost­busters movie.

IESB: When you hear all the rumors about the pos­si­bil­ity of a Ghost­busters 3 for all these years, is that some­thing you hope will even­tu­ally hap­pen, or have you just become indif­fer­ent about it because you’ve been wait­ing for so long?

Ernie: We did the first Ghost­busters, and that was really try­ing for me, in a lot of ways. I worked really hard on the movie for four months, and then the movie came out and was very suc­cess­ful, but work didn’t nec­es­sar­ily come for me, as a result of it. And then, it took five years to get the sec­ond one ready, and that was a chal­lenge, too. Now, it’s been 20 years since the sec­ond one.

I knew Bill Mur­ray really loved the fran­chise, but he was the hold-out. The dis­cus­sion with him has always been that he really wants to do some­thing excep­tional. We tapped into some­thing that was really cre­ative and dif­fer­ent with the first one, so you want to be able to bring that chal­lenge to it. The whole eco­nomic thing becomes an excuse to do noth­ing, so the ten­dency with stu­dios is, “Okay, let’s just do some­thing.” And then, because we have the audi­ence out there, even if we do some­thing bad, by the time they real­ize it’s bad, we’ll have made the money. But, I know that’s not what Bill Mur­ray wants to do, and that’s cer­tainly not some­thing I want to do.

It’s a real catch-22 because you really would love to do another one, since the fans have been ask­ing for it, but you also want to be able to stand by the work that you do. I’m really happy to have been a part of the movie. A lot of actors work for years and never find [some­thing that spe­cial]. Ghost­busters is nice to have in my fil­mog­ra­phy. Wher­ever I go, peo­ple have seen the movie and love it, so that’s really nice.

IESB: So, you’d be happy to return for another film, if they get a script together?

Ernie: I would love to do the movie, for a vari­ety of rea­sons, not the least of which is that I’d love to get paid. So, when Bill Mur­ray says, “I only want to do it if it’s some­thing really extra­or­di­nary that we can really com­mit to,” it’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent than my thing. I’m say­ing that I only want to do the movie for that rea­son, unless they pay me a lot of money. I’m prob­a­bly more con­scious of that. But, the fans are there. Wher­ever I go, peo­ple are always ask­ing about it. I think the stu­dio wants to do it, but hope­fully the script will be really good.

Harold Ramis is tak­ing the lead in it, from what I’ve been read­ing. I hear about it like the fans do. I saw Harold at the open­ing of his film Year One in New York, so I know that he’s been putting together a script that every­one will be happy with. I talked to Bill recently, and I know that Danny [Aykroyd] has been want­ing to do it since the day we fin­ished the sec­ond one. We’re all up for it. It just has to be some­thing we can be proud of and stand by. I’d love for it to hap­pen. I think it would be very, very cool. But, it really needs to be some­thing that makes sense. I don’t want to just do a cameo. If we’re going to do it, I want to be involved.

IESB: Did you enjoy return­ing to the char­ac­ter for the recent video game?

Ernie: I really was very happy with the game because the char­ac­ters were very much there. My char­ac­ter was totally involved. It was a lot of fun to do the voice-over, and hav­ing all the guys back to do it was really cool. So, I’m hop­ing the movie hap­pens, but I have not heard from Ivan Reit­man or the stu­dio, or any­body who signs checks. Until that hap­pens, it’s still just spec­u­la­tion. They also came out with a whole new series of toys. Wher­ever I travel, or when I was doing the play, peo­ple show up with the toys for me to sign.