ANSWER: ...kinda, but not exactly. Made you look ;)
The buzz on "Iron Man 3" is that it's going to be a bigger film, thematically and scale-wise, than the other two; but that the story is staying mainly in the realm of super-science/spy/espionage stuff all pertaining to high-tech weapons and especially other guys wearing weaponized exo-suits - with Guy Pierce playing the main villain (loosely culled from Warren Ellis' "Extremis" story-arc) and Sir Ben Kingsley playing a master-schemer background heavy who may or may not end up being some version of The Mandarin.
Thus far there've been a handful of armor-clad hench-baddies announced, none of whom are big names, and the follow-up word was that - like Whiplash/Crimson-Dynamo in the last movie - there would be some character combination/overhaul going on. In any case, thanks to some "spy" pix snapped by The Superficial and confirmed by Latino Review (who're apparently sitting on a MOUNTAIN of Marvel spoilers they just aren't releasing yet) we now know at least one of the armored characters who'll be popping up in some (presumably villainous) form:
LAST CHANCE NOT TO LOOK, KIDS...
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1...
SOURCE: The Superficial
Ladies and gentlemen... THE IRON PATRIOT.
Holy shit.
So what's with the headline? Okay, short version: As part of the fallout from three successive Marvel Comics "event" miniseries - "Civil War," "World War Hulk" and "Secret Invasion" - The Avengers wound up disbanded, exiled or turned to fugitives. Needing someone to run the government-backed version of The Avengers that had been established by Iron Man's "side" at the end of "Civil War," the Pentagon had the brilliant idea of placing things in the hands of a wealthy businessman who was also "reformed" supervillain who'd recently lucked into an act of press-friendly heroism during "Secret Invasion"... NORMAN OSBORN, aka THE GREEN GOBLIN.
Osborn (who'd already been managing a team of "rehabbed" villains as director The Thunderbolts) installed a group of fellow antagonists as the "real" Avengers using the now government-owned names and costumes of the originals, but figured that they also required the symbolism of Captain America and Iron Man for the public to trust them - his solution was to reconfigure one of Tony Stark's spare suits with Cap's colors and christen himself a new hero; "The Iron Patriot."
Obviously, Osborn (who hasn't even "officially" become part of the new Spider-Man movies yet) is not going to be in the suit in "Iron Man 3." The spy pix confirm James Badge Dale, already announced as one of the heavies, is wearing it for these shots; so it seems he's still a bad guy... but his purpose is unclear.
Here's what intrigues me about this: The visual of a villain wearing what amounts to an even more ostentatious version of Captain America's uniform (it's probably too much to hope that Cap himself will show up as part of this) is "edgier" than we've come to expect from Marvel to begin with, and the specter of a stars-and-stripes clad villain in a movie set-in and partially-financed-by China raises a certain amount of "hmm..." potential. Iron Patriot's original function was as a one-man (literal) "false flag" operation, and writer/director Shane Black has repeatedly invoked "Tom Clancy" as the angle the film's story is working from - are we seeing the beginnings of the film's plot? Maybe an attempt to start/avert a U.S./China war via a bad guy claiming to represent America?
I like this. I like it a lot.
UPDATED: Latino Review now thinks it might alternate be a similar-looking but less confusingly-backstoried character called "Detroit Steel." If so, let me be the first to call possible-foul on using anyone named "Detroit" as a villain in these times - that place has suffered enough.
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