Iron Man 3 doesn’t come out until May 3, 2013, but of course people are going to be interested in what’s going on with it, even now.

Yesterday, Geek Tyrant posted these set pics of actor James Badge Dale suited up in the red-white-and-blue get-up.

Take a gander!

So… what do you think?

I think the suit looks pretty good from these photos, so it’ll likely look stellar once Marvel Studios does all that post production and special effects stuff with it.

According to Geek Tyrant, Dale’s character in the comics is Eric Savin, a colonel who becomes a cyborg named Coldblood and fights Iron Man as a bad guy.

And what does Geek Tyrant have to say about the patriotic suit of armor he’s wearing in the photos?

Norman Osborn wears a full battlesuit patterned after the heroic images of Captain America and Iron Man. The battlesuit was cobbled together from StarkTech that had been confiscated from Tony Stark’s armory at Avengers Tower shortly after H.A.M.M.E.R.’s formation. However, Osborn lacked the technical expertise on how to operate the armor’s repulsor generators efficiently (replacing it with the not as powerful Uni-Beam projector star-shaped output), making it less powerful than Stark’s Iron Man armors. It was hacked into and shut down for good by Iron Man at the end of the Seige of Asgard due to the armor based off an older design and has been not in use since.

During the Red Skull’s invasion of America the armor was vaporized by Skadi.

This would make more sense to you if you’d followed the recent Marvel Comics crossovers like Civil War, Siege, and Fear Itself, but basically, the movie folks have cobbled together story elements from a lot of Marvel Comics storylines to make things work for Iron Man 3.

And given Marvel’s track record with movies lately, they’ll likely do a fantastic job making it work for the screen.