Kevin Feige on Pepper Potts Suiting Up in IRON MAN 3 and More

If you're looking for some more cool Iron Man 3 information, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige recently discussed the highly anticipated Marvel film with About.com. In it he talks about the high stakes of the story, its family appeal, the film's rating, Pepper Potts suiting up, and the love triangle between Tony Stark, Pepper, and his suits of armor. 

The love triangle in this movie is really between Tony, Pepper and the suits. Tony, Pepper and his obsession with those suits, and the obsession with technology. And, it’s sort of unique for a big superhero summer blockbuster franchise to have that kind of layers. Yes, there’s a bad guy. Yes, the stakes are very, very high--the President of the United States is in danger. Air Force One is attacked. There are big stakes to this movie. But the real stakes are, is Tony going to be able to set aside the obsession to spend all day, every day in that workshop, tinkering with the suits in order to focus on, as he says in the trailer, the one thing that matters most - Pepper. And that actually is what the entire movie’s about.

A lot of fans are wondering if Potts is going to suit up in the film. Feige doesn't give a direct answer, but he certainly throws out some hints that that's what we could see!

In this movie we play with the convention of the damsel in distress. We are bored by the damsel in distress. But, sometimes we need our hero to be desperate enough in fighting for something other than just his own life. So, there is fun to be had with "Is Pepper in danger or is Pepper the savior?" over the course of this movie. In terms of where we go with future movies, we’ll see. In the comic books she does get a taste for the suit and becomes her own hero named Rescue, who doesn’t necessarily battle other people, but is on missions to help people and to save people. Will we do that down the line with Gwyneth Paltrow? Who knows. But her being in the suit is something we have been playing with since Iron Man 2, where we did some designs and it didn’t end up fitting in that movie. But the little taste you saw here [in a clip] is something that we’re certainly interested in.

Feige goes on to talk about some early footage from the film that was recently shown to some press outlets. The footage included Tony Stark coming in contact with a ten year-old kid who helps him out. Here's what Feige had to say about the scene and the kid that they ended up casting in the role.

Here [Tony] is in the middle of Tennessee with his hat pulled low, and he’s trying to do this investigation. And there's this very sweet and funny relationship that he begins with this little boy. He is quite the smart-aleck with the little boy, oh yes. The boy is shocked at first, and then slowly begins to sort of give as good as he gets from Tony. We auditioned lots and lots of kids, and Tyson came in and was just a real kid. He could barely keep a straight face looking at Robert. He bonded with Robert completely, and we decided, you know what, this is the kid to cast.

I called Robert. I said, "I think he’s the best kid. I’m going to cast him." He said, "Let me call him"...And when he came out of school, his cell phone rang and it was Robert Downey, Jr. calling saying, you’re going to be in Iron Man 3. And so it continued like that for the rest of the production. It was really great and they formed a nice bond. And it is a fun bond. Tony does not treat him like a kid...he doesn’t, you know, pat him on the head and treat him like a little boy necessarily. Which, I think little boys like when adults don’t treat them like that. So, we’ve screened it for a few audiences just in a normal test screening, and this relationship is ranked as one of the most surprising, unique and new things about the movie.

He goes on to talk about the family appeal of the film, and the rating saying,

In terms of the marketing of this movie, if you go back and look at the marketing of Avengers, it promises a much darker movie than the movie actually is. The movie is much more fun than the trailer would show. Same thing with this. This trailer is--he’s being blown apart, his life is at stake, how will he get out of it? The movie is much, much more fun than that, but that’s what gets people into the audience. All of our movies are PG-13. I know parents who take their four-year-olds, and I know parents who won’t let their kids see them until they’re thirteen. So, that really depends on that. For us, there are things you can do if you are going by the letter of the law in a PG-13 movie...there’s a level of violence you can add, there’s a level of sexuality you can have, there’s a level of language you can have. We never go anywhere near the top of that. Because we don’t want to. Because that’s not what our characters are about. When you have the amount of fighting and explosions, and some blood on his nose when he puts the suit on, we do want that. We want it to be real. Otherwise, it’s just a CG thing hitting a CG person. So that’s why we’re always in that PG-13 range. But, Jon Favreau on the first two movies, Joss Whedon on the Avengers, myself--we have kids. We want to be able to take our kids to these movies and to enjoy them. It’s really the level of intensity that determines whether parents are comfortable taking their kids to it as opposed to content, necessarily.

Marvel has done a great job with the movies they've been making, and it looks and sounds like Iron Man 3 is going to kick some solid PG-13 ass.

Are you hoping to see Pepper Potts suit up in this third movie? 

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