VIDEO: The Nick Fury Scene from 'Iron Man' @ JustPressPlay

Monday.May.05.2008

VIDEO: The Nick Fury Scene from 'Iron Man'

Let me start by ranting a little bit. So we've known for a long time that Samuel L. Jackson is supposed to cameo in Iron Man as Nick Fury, possibly as a launching pad for Jackson to star in a Nick Fury movie.

For whatever reasons, Paramount decided to cut out the Nick Fury scene from the end of the movie for press screenings. Apparently so the advanced audiences couldn't spoil it for the others. But spoil what, exactly? The news was already out for months to those who cared enough to find out about these things. And it's not like it ruins anything about the scene to know about it. What's the big surprise? The fact that people stayed during advanced screenings only to be disappointed by the missing scene fueled many misinformed posts on the 'Net that the scene is not in the final version of the movie.

I ended up seeing the movie for the second time Saturday--partly because I liked it, but mostly because I wanted to see the cameo. It was fun; the crowd's reaction alone was worth the price. I should've known, though, that it wouldn't take long at all for someone to post it online. There have been several, in fact, but this is the highest quality one I could find:

On my way out of the theater, I heard someone asked her friend, "Why did they get Sam Jackson just for that?" in which the correct answer is, of course, because in the comic book The Ultimates (an updated version of the regular Marvel universe's Avengers), Nick Fury was made black, with the features of Mr. Jackson. Writer Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch did this deliberately, reasoning that Nick Fury is a super-cool super-smooth super-spy, so when they started The Ultimates, they thought of the coolest person alive at the time (2002), and they agreed on Samuel L. Jackson. The character is one of the more popular re-imaginings in Marvel's Ultimate universe, so obviously when talks of a Nick Fury movie came up, they're thinking of the Sam Jackson Ultimates version.

As a bonus, here's a lovely scene from The Ultimates #4 (June 2002) where the team sits around and talk about who would play them if a movie was made about their lives:

Now that we've seen Iron Man, what do we think? Robert Downey, Jr. or Johnny Depp? Edward Norton or Steve Buscemi (completely different personalities on this one, obviously)?

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