At an spe­cial screen­ing of Iron Man and a live com­men­tary by direc­tor Jon Favreau and Downey Jr., cov­ered by Film­Crunch, a num­ber of sequel and Avengers hints were pointed out:

Through­out the movie, the actor-turned-director pointed out and con­firmed var­i­ous scenes which hinted at both The Avengers movie (vis­i­ble S.H.I.E.L.D. logos) and the sequel (he noted that the ter­ror­ist cell in the movie is merely one branch of Mandarin’s group).

Downey served to be more enter­tain­ing dur­ing the com­men­tary than his char­ac­ter in Iron Man, which I didn’t think was possible.

With the DVD release and the var­i­ous on disc com­men­taries, we can look for­ward to more details about the forth­com­ing sequel.