I freak­ing loved Iron Man. Looooved it. Loved it so much I saw it twice and now own it on Blu-Ray and watch it about once a month. It’s a great film, and John Favreau did a great job of helm­ing a pos­si­bly career-sinking film. It’s cool and smart and con­fi­dent and funny and smart and Robert Downey Jr., who a few years ago I would have writ­ten off as Cory Haim-in-the-present mate­r­ial, soars as Tony Stark. And hav­ing any­body else play Stark (Nicholas Cage and Tom Cruise were inter­ested in play­ing Stark) would have been weird in hindsight.

And I really love that movie. I truly do.

And now Iron Man 2 is com­ing up this Fri­day. And I couldn’t be more ner­vous about it.

I’m wor­ried it’s just gonna be ter­ri­ble. I think my rea­son­ing is that the first time around there wasn’t so much focus on who the bad guys are, and I think that the peo­ple play­ing the bad guys are bad choices. The Bat­man fran­chise started to die when the films focused more on the bad guys than on Bat­man. Mickey Rourke? Really? He looks ter­ri­ble. And silly. And Scar­lett Johans­son? Man, she’s so one-note actress (like Natalie Port­man) it’s not even funny.

Maybe it’s the prod­uct tie-ins (I’ve seen about 25 in the past cou­ple of days) or the bad guys in the movie. I don’t know. Just have a strange feel­ing about this one. Maybe it’ll be dif­fer­ent once I see it, and I’ll see it, but we’ll see.

UPDATE - The reviews are in and they aren’t that great. Com­pared to the 92% that the first Iron Man film got among the top crit­ics on RT, IM2 has got­ten a rous­ing 66%. One of my favorite authors, Cory Doc­torow tweeted “Iron Man 2: the stu­pid, it burns. Wait for DVD, watch in Ital­ian, pre­tend it’s opera.” I kinda feel bad for John Favreau, who’s a great direc­tor, but I’m sure he’s laugh­ing all the way to the bank since IM2 brought in, in the open­ing week­end, $128,122,480. Typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood. We’ll see, after word of mouth, what the dropoff will be.