This is apparently a villain that will appear in Iron Man 3, and since he’s wearing the Iron Patriot armor design there is a lot of talk about the Marvel movieverse setting up a Dark Avengers storyline down the road.  I kind of doubt it.

The obvious problem with pitting the Avengers against the Dark Avengers is that it means nothing without Norman Osborn.  The entire Dark Reign storyline was about Osborn taking over the Avengers and sending all the real superheroes running  underground; no Norman, no Dark Reign.  As I’m sure everyone knows, Norman appeared in the 2002 Spider-Man film, and the rights to use the character are still attached to the Spidey movie franchise at Sony.

Even without Norman, a movie version of the original Dark Avengers would be hard to pull off.  Venom (any version) is definitely out.  I doubt Bullseye is available, and even if Daken is he’s too close to Wolverine for Fox to be thrilled about it.  Ares is doable but I’m not sure Marvel wants to open up the Greek pantheon so soon after introducing Asgard.  That leaves Moonstone, Sentry, Noh-varr, and Victoria Hand, and most of those characters barely did anything in the first Dark Avengers series.  At that point any plan to introduce a team of villains-as-heroes might as well be based on the Thunderbolts instead, because it won’t look much like anything we saw in Dark Reign.

From what I understand Iron Man 3 is supposed to feature a villain named Coldblood—a test subject to create a cybernetic super-soldier that goes bad.  The character’s comics design doesn’t look all that compelling, so my guess is that for the movie they decided to use the Iron Patriot suit instead, seeing as it looks cooler and nobody else was using it.  The Dark Avengers references probably begin and end there.  I can’t imagine Coldblood taking up Norman’s role from Dark Reign, or leading a team of evil Avengers.  That’s something you’d do with a bigger name like Baron Zemo, Ultron, or Taskmaster.  (Being a T-bolts fan, my vote’s for Zemo, natch.)

As for comics continuity, I hope nobody watches Iron Man 3 and gets confused reading comics and wondering why a completely different guy is wearing this star-spangled suit.  If I was Quesada I’d definitely move to revamp Coldblood to resemble the movie version, and stick him in the suit—after all, it must be sitting in some storage facility somewhere, and could be put to good (or bad) use again.  Maybe down the road he could even join the new Dark Avengers working for Luke Cage.  But in the movie world, I don’t think we’ll see much of this suit after Iron Man 3 ends.