It looks like everybody’s favorite Iron Man is keeping his hand in the big budget Action-Adventure arena. Robert Downey Jr. is in negotiations to star in Cowboys and Aliens, a Sci-Fi / Western in which a battle between the Apache and Western settlers is interrupted by an alien spaceship crashing in the Old West.

Talk about high concept!

The film is based on a graphic novel idea by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, written by Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley. DreamWorks and Universal hope that the Brian Grazer and Ron Howard produced film will be a summer tent-pole film for 2010.

But wait. Isn’t Iron Man 2 set for release that year? Isn’t Downey Jr. signed to play Tony Stark in the second film in the franchise?

What’s going on?

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