Grif­fin from the OCTA forums has reported back from the Aussie toy fair 2009 at the Mel­bourne Exhi­bi­tion Cen­tre, com­plete with images of new Trans­form­ers Revenge of the Fallen toys. ON dis­play were a cou­ple of mod­els from each toy class — four leg­ends toys, two scouts, three deluxe, two voy­ager, two leader (includ­ing the Jet­fire pre­views we’ve seen recently), supreme class dev­as­ta­tor, one FAB, three power bots (unpainted Dev­as­ta­tor pro­to­type and Opti­mus Prime/Jetfire com­bined form), two robot heroes and three grav­ity bots. Notably, the dev­as­ta­tor toy on show was an unsta­ble, unpainted pro­to­type that was tied up with fish­ing wire.

Over the week­end a selec­tion of new toy images turned up, includ­ing Megatron’s Leader class (TF08, via Seib­ertron), the blue bike — a pos­si­ble con­stituent part of Arcee and dubbed “Chro­mia” (TF08) after a leaked toy list and the pack­ag­ing for Long Haul, Jet­fire, Ratchet and Side­ways Fast Action bat­tler toys (The-Arker):

Aus­tralian forums OCTA have cap­tured new images of the leader class Jet­fire toy, one of the last remain­ing char­ac­ters for us to see in toy mode. The pack­ag­ing shows both robot mode and Black­bird alt mode, it also con­firms that the toy can com­bine with the leader class Opti­mus Prime.

His bio reads:

Jet­fire grew tired of war a long time ago. The reck­less ambi­tion of the Decep­ti­cons, and the sense­less vio­lence of their war sick­ened him, and so he left Cybertron to go into hid­ing. The form he even­tu­ally chose on Earth seemed appro­pri­ate for one who wished to remain unseen. He slum­bered in peace for years. Now, reawak­ened by the arrival of the war on Earth, he decides once again to enter the fight — this time on the side of the Auto­bots, and this to end it for good, what­ever the cost.

There is also another “Flight Mode” opti­mus prime toy that shows the com­bi­na­tion with Jetfire:

We pre­vi­ously reported that Ryan Gosling could be inline to play The Green Lantern, since then the ante on the movie has upped — with the WB plac­ing all its chips in the green bas­ket, given the hes­i­ta­tion and fail­ings of the Super­man and Jus­tice League fran­chises — sug­gest­ing that the Green Lantern role might need re-evaluating.

The IESB are now report­ing a short list of pos­si­ble actors to play the main role, head­ing the list is Star Trek star (Cap­tain Kirk), Chris Pine. Jon Hamm, Sam Wor­thing­ton and Nathan Fil­lion have also been men­tioned. The WB are look­ing for ‘a man’s man under 30′.

We’ll clas­sify this one as rumor for now, espe­cially as Pine’s agent has declined to com­ment, how­ever with film­ing set to begin in Sep­tem­ber it shouldn’t be too long before we see an offi­cial announcement.

The WB are set to begin film­ing The Green Lantern in mid-September in Aus­tralia, report Pro­duc­tion Weekly. The Aus­tralian loca­tion doesn’t come as much of a sur­prise given the loca­tion scout­ing reports we com­mented on in Decem­ber. Mean­while the pro­duc­tion crew has cre­ated a base camp at the Tribeca West com­plex pro­duc­tion offices, sit­u­ated in West Los Angeles.

Update: @WarnerBrosEnt sched­uled to begin film­ing mid-September in Aus­tralia on “Green Lantern”

TF08 have posted pic­tures of the Mega­tron Robot Replica fig­ure with extra large right claw and tracks for feet:

Yes­ter­day Para­mount and Dream­works offi­cially announced that Trans­form­ers 3 shall be land­ing in cin­e­mas come Fri­day July 1st 2011, Vari­ety:

Para­mount and Dream­Works are forg­ing ahead with “Trans­form­ers 3,” dat­ing the movie for release on July 1, 2011.
It’s the first word of the three-quel, although Para­mount insid­ers down­played the impor­tance of the move.
They said the stu­dio wanted to claim the date before a com­peti­tor did, con­sid­er­ing that the 2011 sum­mer release cal­en­dar is fill­ing up.
No deals have been inked with direc­tor Michael Bay or fran­chise stars Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox. Nor has a writer been hired for the third installment.

In response, Michael Bay has posted on his forums:

I said I was tak­ing off a year from Trans­form­ers. Para­mount made a mis­take in dat­ing Trans­form­ers 3 — they asked me on the phone — I said yes to July 4 — but for 2012 — whoops! Not 2011!!! That would mean I would have to start prep in Sep­tem­ber. No way. My brain needs a break from fight­ing robots.

Michael

Looks like some­one messed up here. No date set for now — but we know Trans­form­ers 3 is def­i­nitely planned.

Jon Favreau has updated his Twit­ter account to announce the Iron Man 2 shoot­ing sta­tus (we’re on Twit­ter too),

Rehearsals began today on Iron Man 2. Three weeks from shoot­ing and my life is no longer my own. I for­got how over­whelm­ing this process is.

Mean­while, AICN’s Capone has caught up with Favreau to ques­tion him about the recent spate of cast­ing announce­ments, no more big sur­prises coming:

Capone: There has been a lot of IRON MAN 2 news fly­ing around in the last few days. What’s true? What’s not?

Jon Favreau: I can’t con­firm any cast­ing stuff because there have been no announce­ments made, but let me say that the peo­ple that have deals that should all be final­ized in our cast this week, I should hope…it’s a dif­fer­ent process being that Mar­vel is not a big stu­dio and they don’t really have the infra­struc­ture to get things out there; it’s not as stream­lined as a stu­dio, so I apol­o­gize to the fans for not being able to say things as quickly as pos­si­ble. But they really want to have legal pro­tec­tions and not offi­cially say things until every­thing is done. But, I’m very excited about the peo­ple that we have. There are no big sur­prises in cast­ing com­ing that I can fore­see [laughs]. It’s going to be a really, really good group of peo­ple and a story that takes advan­tage of our cast but is in inun­dated and doesn’t get too com­plex because of the num­ber of new peo­ple that we’re adding, which is always a tar pit for these super­hero movies, you always have to make sure that you add the char­ac­ters in a smart way.

Capone: Are you qui­etly relieved that Samuel L. Jack­son has signed on to play Nick Fury for a bil­lion movies or some­thing like that?

JF: [laughs] I wasn’t wor­ried that Sam sign­ing a nine-picture deal was going to hold up my movie, no. That would have been really bizarre if that had happened.