Was Universal expecting ‘Iron Man’ to be this big? I don’t know. They probably didn’t think they were getting the second prize by buying the ‘The Incredible Hulk’ distribution rights, while Paramount bought ‘Iron Man.’ But now Universal is using ‘Iron Man’ to sell ‘The Incredible Hulk’ to their audience. People who are currently calling MovieTickets.com for ‘Iron Man’ tickets are receiving a paid advertising message.

The computer will ask the caller, “Like Tony Stark? See more of him in ‘Incredible Hulk’ in theaters on June 13. Press 1 to get a text message reminder…” If they do, they will get a SMS the day before ‘The Incredible Hulk’ opens. “We’ve done audio ads for ticketing sites in the past. This was a really cool opportunity to contextually target and serve the ad to a really relevant, hyper-targeted audience, and have the ability to re-target them,” Megan Crowell of advertising agency Ignited said.

Apptera, the company that implemented the message, said the campaign saw a 3% sign-up rate. “What the studio wants to do is get a big opening weekend, to have these time bombs, people carrying cell phones that start buzzing on opening day,” they said. So there you have it. Hollywood’s new way to target you, cell phones. Last month we saw a similar idea with the new Batman movie. Some people got a call about ‘The Dark Knight,’ with some questions about Harvey Dent.

More ‘The Incredible Hulk’ pics have made it onto the web. I wonder if the $125 million superhero can make the impact ‘Iron Man’ had. We know how they tried to shake off the ‘Hulk’ failure image of 2003, but I’m not sure everybody has forgotten. Not to mention the amount of competition, when it launches June 13.

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.