Today's Film News: Ironclad

By Katey Rich

In case you haven't noticed, Variety has gone nuts over Iron Man, starting with a rave review and coming down to a whole special section dedicated to the iron giant. It's hard to believe that it's already time for the first of the summer blockbusters (it's cold and rainy here in New York), but even with the Tribeca Film Festival humming along and Cannes excitement building up, Iron Man is the big news for the next week. It already has an 89% Rotten Tomatoes score ("I loved it," writes New York Magazine's David Edelstein) but the real question, of course, is how much money will it make? If you're still listening to the Iron Man nuts at Variety, a lot; Anne Thompson cites predictions of as much as $100 million for opening weekend. Paramount will surely be trying to temper expectations, but there's a lot of hope riding on those big iron shoulders.

Though his most recent film, Idiocracy, was shunted to box-office Siberia, Office Space director Mike Judge is giving the big screen a shot again with Extract, a Miramax comedy starring Jason Bateman. The Hollywood Reporter says that Judge will write and direct Bateman as a beleaguered flower extract plant owner, sounding not all that different from Ron Livingston's cubicle drone character from Office Space.

Coming off the steamy Deception, Ewan McGregor may be trying to atone for his sins by playing a Cardinal in Angels & Demons, the prequel to The Da Vinci Code. The Reporter writes that McGregor would star alongside Tom Hanks, who is reprising his role as symbiologist Robert Langdon, as a papal aide who initially helps out the hero. Shooting of the long-anticipated, oft-delayed project is set to begin in Europe in June.

And finally, check out our sister publication The Hollywood Reporter for its new redesign, and imagine how jealous we are over here that we haven't yet gotten the same attention. The look is snazzy, the format is easy to navigate, and even though most of today's news is about television (it is pilot season, after all), I expect them to be pumping out the same movie reporting in an even easier-to-read format.