“There’s an Iron Man 3. Here’s how I know. When they make the option deals, they include Iron Man 3. So I know they’re planning on 3. Whether that would be before or after Avengers, they’ve announced that Avengers is next but they pushed back The Avengers once, which I thought was encouraging.”

“Jon Favreau and the producers are not stupid. They’re also listening in on all of this and wanting to get the pulse of where the audience is. But at some point, they want to introduce Mandarin into the storyline and my character, like Mandarin, was the leader of the Ten Rings. We’re leaving it open because, partly, it makes good business sense for us to leave a little bit of uncertainty for people to speculate on.
[…]
He has known for a long time where he wants to take it and I don’t want to speak for him, but my feeling is that the second movie didn’t want to just follow a singular storyline. They wanted to expand the characters to show that it’s not a linear saga like Lord of the Rings. There’s a linkage somewhere in there, but the big idea is to do at least one more Iron Man movie and then go into The Avengers.”