Marvel's Iron Man 3 debuts May 3 in the U.S. (Iron Man 3 has an April 18 release date in the UK) and the Man of Steel release date is not long after — hitting theatres on June 14. The trailers for both films have most fans waiting in eager anticipation. But which one is most likely to be the better Summer 2013 blockbuster?
Our vote of confidence goes to Iron Man 3, for which the latest trailer can be found at the bottom of this page.
Marvel films aren't afraid to be comic book movies, while DC films strive for dark, gritty realism. Even Batman's suit of armor has a reasonable, real-world explanation: it's simply state-of-the-art military equipment that the Army was too cheap to spring for.
The one recent exception to DC realism was the studio's bizarrely bubble-gum Green Lantern film from 2011 starring Ryan Reynolds, which if you saw it, you have our condolences. If anything, the movie cemented DC's belief that superhero movies, at least for them, can only succeed with an aesthetic bordering on film noir.
The Avengers film proved that you can go in the exact opposite direction and create something just as good, if not better. Robert Downey Jr. summarized this position with some terse words in a 2012 interview:
"My whole thing is that that I saw 'The Dark Knight' ... It's like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I'm like, 'That's not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.' I didn't understand [it]. Didn't get it, still can't tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I'm like, 'I get it. This is so high brow and so f-king smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.' You know what? F-ck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."
