The toy video reviews are prov­ing pop­u­lar and more and more of them are pop­ping up, here there and every­where. This time its a review of the green Skids Deluxe class toy by Dl3anksak47, he has also posted other video reviews on his YouTube chan­nel:

Mar­vel Stu­dios have announced a slew of new super­hero movie releases dates in the forth­com­ing years — of most inter­est to this crowd are Spider-man 4, now set to appear in screens nation­wide on May 6th 2011 and an updated release for Iron Man 2 — now hit­ting the­aters on May 7th 2010 (pre­vi­ously April 20th).

Also of sig­nif­i­cant inter­est are the Thor, Cap­tain Amer­i­can and The Avengers movie dates which have been updated to:
Thor — June 17, 2011
The First Avenger: Cap­tain Amer­ica — July 22, 2011
The Avengers — May 4, 2012

“This new sched­ule strongly sequences Marvel’s movie debut dates, big screen char­ac­ter intro­duc­tions and momen­tum. It max­i­mizes the vis­i­bil­ity of our sin­gle character-focused films, lead­ing to the highly antic­i­pated release of the multi-character ‘The Avengers’ film in 2012,” said David Maisel, Chair­man, Mar­vel Studios.

Via SHH

More gal­leries of the Leg­ends class Opti­mus Prime & Mega­tron, Deluxe class Skids and Side­swipe and FAB Long­haul and Side­ways have appeared online. No big reveals — although Bum­ble­bee does sport some new pop out canons that can be used in both robot and alt modes (via TFW005).

Opti­mus Prime — Leader Class
Mega­tron — Leader Class
Skids — Deluxe Class
Side­swipe — Deluxe Class
Long­haul — FAB
Side­ways — FAB

MTV have briefly spo­ken with Brett Rat­ner con­cern­ing the new Conan movie, Rat­ner revealed that the story shall return to its roots and the mythol­ogy of the char­ac­ters before com­ment­ing on his own involve­ment in the adaptation:

“The script is very cool, con­tem­po­rary,” Rat­ner told MTV News. “It’s not an homage. It’s not a remake, really. It’s going back to the orig­i­nal source mate­r­ial — the mythol­ogy of the characters.”

“[Screen­writ­ers Dirk Black­man and Howard McCain] just did an incred­i­ble, incred­i­ble job or else I wouldn’t be risk­ing it,” said Rat­ner. “Because I know how dif­fi­cult it is to do these movies and its some­thing that I’m really excited about.”

And our sec­ond major announce­ment of the week — Scar­lett Johans­son has been con­firmed as The Black Widow in Iron Man 2, replac­ing the sched­uled out Emily Blunt. This con­firms the rumors we reported on Valen­tines day.

This comes via Nikki Finke’s Dead­line Hol­ly­wood Daily, although unlike the recent Rourke deal, it seems like Johans­son did get ‘low-balled’ into this and a whole host of other Mar­vel movies, includ­ing The Avengers. Finke also reveals that Johans­son had pre­vi­ously screened for the part and didn’t get it.

I’ve already posted my scoop that Mickey Rourke will play the Russ­ian vil­lain in Iron Man 2 in a Mar­vel Stu­dios deal that started out low­ball and went up a lot. Now I’m told that Emily Blunt won’t be in the sequel and Black Widow will now be played by Scar­lett Johann­son. (Inter­est­ing because Scar­lett actu­ally screen-tested for the role and didn’t get it.) But I hear that, unlike Mickey’s money, the deal for her is “just the oppo­site, a ter­ri­ble deal made by CAA,” one of my insid­ers says. “It’s as bad as any deal that I’ve heard. It’s low­ball money. And it ties her to count­less movies, includ­ing that ensem­ble The Avengers, which is what makes this bru­tal for a lot of actors.”

How do you feel about Scar­lett get­ting the role? Although very tal­ented I do not see her fit­ting the part of the Black Widow — it just doesn’t feel right some­how; but I am per­fectly happy to be proved wrong.

Excel­lent, another fine actor con­firmed for Iron Man 2. Dead­line Hol­ly­wood Daily has con­firmed the news that Mickey Rourke shall appear in the Iron Man sequel — with a quote sig­nif­i­cantly higher than the low $250k we’d pre­vi­ously reported (and the cause of the cast­ing wor­ries). This news is par­tic­u­larly encour­ag­ing given Rourke’s recent com­ments — “Right now, we’re not doing Iron Man 2.”

I just heard that ICM has scored its sec­ond cast­ing deal for Marvel’s Iron Man 2. After at first being low-balled by the stu­dio to the tune of $250K, Rourke has signed on for the role of the Russ­ian vil­lain in the sequel after his agent David Unger got the quote up to a “sig­nif­i­cant” level despite this pun­ish­ing eco­nomic cli­mate where the stu­dios are tak­ing advan­tage of tal­ent. (No won­der Mickey kept thank­ing Unger so pro­fusely in accep­tance speeches for the BAFTA, Golden Globes, Spirit, and other awards.) But don’t expect Mar­vel to con­firm any of this: they won’t until all the i’s are dot­ted and t’s crossed on the con­tracts. I can also tell you that Sony was con­sid­er­ing hir­ing Mickey to play the vil­lain in Spider-Man 4.

Update: Vari­ety has added that Rourke will play Whiplash per­haps with some ele­ments of Crim­son Dynamo. Rourke has also met with Justin Ther­oux and Jon Favreau and has had some involve­ment in his character’s development.

Next up — a Black Widow cast­ing announcement?

Jon Favreau has released the first image from the Iron Man 2 set, show­ing him­self and cin­e­matog­ra­pher Matthew Liba­tique stand­ing amongst the build­ing work that is Tony Stark’s house. Despite the early stages of the set con­struc­tion, the style of Stark’s house can already be spot­ted in the cir­cu­lar ceil­ing pan­els and styl­ish steps.

Via Com­ing Soon

A dis­cus­sion over at Michael Bay’s forums, “Shoot for the edit” started after an inter­view between Frank Welker and TFW2005 was posted by a fan, along with a plea to the direc­tor, specifically:

TFW: Have you been approached at all for any fur­ther work with the fran­chise, either with the movie (Sound­wave?) or another incar­na­tion, such as Trans­form­ers: Ani­mated?
Welker: Well it is a lit­tle too early to be spe­cific but I will say yes and no. No, I have not been approached by the movie folks but yes I am still involved in the franchise…more on that later.

Michael, I can under­stand your choice in terms of Mega­tron, and I know you’re prob­a­bly ready to mur­der the next guy who brings up the topic of orig­i­nal voice actors…but please, please allow Frank a shot at Soundwave’s voice. I’m risk­ing get­ting banned by Nel­son (again) just to ask. His par­tic­i­pa­tion in the fran­chise really does mean that much to a load of fans out there.

I swear this is the last time I will ever bring this sub­ject up until the movie’s release.

To which Michael Bay responded positively:

I think I’m going to pur­sue Frank on Sound­wave.
Michael

For those not in the know, Frank Welker voiced both Mega­tron and Sound­wave in the orig­i­nal ani­mated series, he also reprized his role as Mega­tron for the recent video game.