The impressive ‘Iron Man’ opening last month caused Marvel Entertainment’s stock to jump over 10% to settle the Monday after release with a 7.5% gain. But the mediocre ‘The Incredible Hulk’ opening did quite the opposite. Marvel stock began the day with an expected drop of about 5% to quickly regain its loss during the morning. Still, it didn’t manage to end above the previous close of $36.11. Marvel Entertainment ended the day with $35.69, a 1.16% drop.

Now all this can be explained by how bearish Wall Street was on ‘Iron Man.’ Not much can impress after a $100 million opening by the underdog. Analysts expected the stock to jump mildly if ‘The Incredible Hulk’ performed above $60 million, which it obviously didn’t. And you have to keep in mind Marvel’s stock already climbed from $26 in April, to where it is today.

Now I’m not a stock expert by any means, but I’d say now is not the best time to buy Marvel Entertainment stock.

The only thing we didn’t have was an official word from Marvel, but now we have it. ‘Iron Man 2′ has been confirmed for April 30, 2010. Jon Favreau and his crew already hinted at how they’d like to do a sequel. They said it in like every other interview last week. If it wasn’t for the possible actors’ strike, they might have already been working on it. But Marvel didn’t want to take any risks by setting the release date for next summer.

Marvel Entertainment stock jumped almost 10% as we expected, but settled to around 7.5% later in the day. This while the market was down overall, mostly caused by the failed Yahoo deal and concerns about mortgage lender Countrywide’s suitor backing out as well.

In 2006, Marvel Entertainment started raising $525 million to produce its own movies. Before that it was only licensing its characters, like ‘Spider-man’ to Sony. Their second film will be ‘The Incredible Hulk’ in June and the third will be the just announced ‘Iron Man’ sequel. Marvel also announced their fourth feature called ‘Thor,’ which is planned for June 4, 2010. They sure like their summer season.

Apple stock jumped over 2% when the company announced they are going to release movies simultaneous with their physical counterpart DVD. Normally the iTunes store would have to wait over a month to get a new movie in, but most Hollywood studios are now releasing their babies right onto the net.

The news comes just days after the MPAA stated the industry was too slow with adjusting to their ‘tech-savvy’ crowd. The time has come for Hollywood to embrace digital distribution. “This is a really good example of how they are moving more quickly toward it and we think Apple is best-positioned (to benefit),” said analyst Shannon Cross of Cross Research.

A iTunes movie will only set you back between $9.99 and $14.99, which isn’t as overprices as you would expect. Not at all. The major drawback however, still seems the limited playback capability of all digital downloads. In this case mostly restricted to Apple hardware. When will we see an universal format we can play and keep forever?