There were some reports earlier this year that Marvel was planning to follow up The Avengers with a series of smaller films with modest budgets that focus on lesser known comic book characters. At this point, we’ve essentially already reached the second or third string of Marvel’s stable of superheroes, so these movies would potentially revolve around some pretty obscure characters. Now this week we have confirmation of what may be the first of these smaller movies heading into the early stages of development. According to Deadline New York, Marvel has just hired someone to write a script for an Iron Fist movie.

Rich Wilkes is the man who will be putting pen to paper for the film, and he is best known for writing the screenplay for Vin Diesel’s 2002 actioner xXx. He also co-wrote a number of mid-’90s stoner comedies including Airheads, The Jerky Boys and The Stoned Age. The credit that probably landed him the gig, however, is a screenplay for an upcoming big screen remake of the David Carradine TV series Kung Fu.

Iron Fist aka Danny Rand is a martial arts master with mystical powers who trained in the hidden city of K’un-L’un in the Himalayas. He became a partner with Luke Cage and formed Heroes for Hire, Inc. Apparently Marvel had tried to set up an Iron Fist movie a few years back with Ray Park in the lead role. Either way, it seems like this will be a good choice for a lower budget film, as they could probably just treat it like a direct-to-video martial arts movie. Are you interested in seeing an Iron Fist movie? Do you think this a good direction for Marvel to go in, or are characters like this just not worthy of their own film?