“Iron Man 2” producers are considering a spring start ahead of a May 2010 release of the superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell are now in talks to play the villains in the new sequel.

Even if the script is very well hidden and the producers won’t release any kind of information about it, it is known that Rourke will interpret the role of a heavy Russian tattooed man named Ivan, who turns into Whiplash and has deadly enhanced coils.

On the other hand, Rockwell will play Justin Hammer, who is a multibillionaire businessman and a rival of industrialist Anthony Stark, known as Iron Man and interpreted by Robert Downey Jr.

Directed by Jon Favreau, the 2008 “Iron Man” stars Robert Downey Jr. too, who plays as Tony Stark, a billionaire industrialist and master engineer with a plethora of playboy vices who builds a powered exoskeleton and becomes the technologically advanced superhero named Iron Man.

The project started developing since 1990 at Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox and New Line Cinema, but Marvel Studios got the rights for it in 2006. Marvel put the project in production and it was their first self-financed film. Favreau was chosen to be the director and had a very naturalistic goal for building the characters.

Favreau wanted to shot the movie in California and rejected the East Coast because he didn’t want to make another superhero film set in the New York City environments.

Gwyneth Paltrow now returns for the sequel of “Iron Man” as Tony Stark’s executive assistant. The script for “Iron Man 2” is written by Justin Theroux and expects to do even better than the first movie, which grossed $582 million from all around the world.