Like about a gajillion other people, I loved Iron Man.  It’s probably my favourite comic book based movie in recent year, even beating out the colossus of The Dark Knight, and all reports suggest that Iron Man 2 was going to just as good.  After watching the official trailer however – as seen above – I must admit to being concerned.   Don’t get me wrong, everything in there looks super exciting, but there sure is a lot of it.

That probably seems like a very weird complaint, but Marvel movies have a nasty tendency to stuff way too much content into sequels, which ultimately hurts the film as no single plot line gets enough screen time, and viewers are instead left with a collection of rushed sub plots.  It happened with Spiderman 3 with Venom and it happened with X-Men 3 with, well, with pretty much everything that happens in the movie.

In just that trailer alone, you’ve got at least two new characters – Black Widow and Whiplash – and at least three separate plot lines.  How much time are they really going to be able to set aside for the War Machine plot line for example, if they also trying to tell the story of Tony Stark’s battle with the US Government and the antagonism between Stark’s family and Whiplash, and introducing Black Widow and Justin Hammer?

It’s not impossible that they could make this all work, and I very much hope I’m wrong, but this happens enough in Marvel movies that I’m almost ready to come up with a snappy title for the trend.  I think I’ll default to cautiousness and just hope to be proven wrong.