If you haven’t seen Iron Man 3 yet, chances are none of that headline made any sense to you. And if that’s the case, you might not want to read any further, because I’m going to spoil the hell out of it.
In fact, just to make sure there’s no confusion whatsoever…SPOILER ALERT!
Okay. Now then, about this Fake Mandarin business. As you probably know, Marvel Studios really pissed off a lot of comic book nerds last spring when they set up legendary Iron Man foe Mandarin as the arch villain in Iron Man 3, only to reveal two-thirds of the way through that there is no Mandarin. Instead, there is just a substance-abusing actor named Trevor (played brilliantly by Ben Kingsley) who was being paid to play him on TV.
However, now it seems Marvel is going to try to make it up to everyone with a new short film that will be included as a bonus feature on the upcoming Thor 2 Blu-Ray. It’s called All Hail the King, and it was first announced last week. However, it wasn’t until today that we learned for sure that it is, in fact, about Trevor. Entertainment Weekly got the scoop and the first stills of the film. Behold:
Drew Pearce, who wrote Iron Man 3, is also behind All Hail the King. And while he stopped short of giving it all away, he definitely opened the door to the possibility that we will see a REAL Mandarin some time in the future. Here’s what he had to say:
There’s lots of exposition in lots of different cuts of Iron Man 3 that, in the end, kind of got snubbed out. It’s kind of said in Iron Man 3 but very briefly, Aldrich essentially took a thing that was real, historically real and culturally real, and co-opted it for his own means — essentially co-opting an ancient terrorist concept. What [All Hail the King] does is show that everything in Iron Man 1 [involving the terrorist group] was canon all along any way. We kind of knew The Ten Rings were a real terrorist cell.
So will we find out that the REAL terrorists are led by a REAL Mandarin? We’ll have to wait until February 25, when Thor 2 comes out on Blu-Ray.
