The sequel to Iron Man depicts what happens now that the world knows the identity of the armoured man's alter ego, while giving audiences more of what they liked about the first film.
At a press conference at the end of the first movie, billionaire industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jnr) revealed he is Iron Man. Stark wants to underline the benefits of the Iron Man suit by relaunching his late father's Stark Expo, a showcase for the humanitarian innovations inspired by its technology.
As the US government insists he turn the weapon over to the military, the mysterious Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) sets out to destroy Stark by revealing his own devastating weapon based on Stark's technology.
Overwhelmed on all fronts - and facing his own demons - Stark has to call on allies old and new to help him confront the gathering forces that threaten to destroy him and mankind.
When moulding the storyline, the filmmakers had to decide what elements and characters to draw on from the more than 600 issues of Iron Man comics published over the past 42 years. That posed a challenge for director Jon Favreau, as he had to strike a balance between giving the plot a certain degree of unpredictability, and keeping it reasonably simple.
'Plot is something I'm not particularly great at because I don't have a mindset for twisty, turny, maze-like stories. I'm more of a story guy, which I used to think was synonymous with plot, but it's really a different element of movie-making,' he says, adding story is more about showing the arc of a character - where they begin and end, their challenges, and how they change in the process.
In Iron Man 2, 'Tony probably should have slowed down, but he was inspired by the discoveries that he made in escaping captivity in the cave and his revelation about where he fits into the world,' Favreau says.