Iron Man 3 Bad Guy Mandarin Returns In New Short Film [Video]
Iron Man 3 fans, we’re going to assume you’ve all seen the movie by now because you can’t learn about Marvel’s new short film without being exposed to a few spoilers.
With a take surpassing $409 million, Iron Man 3 was 2013’s second-highest grossing movie. Only The Hunger Games: Catching Fire bested the Marvel Comics superhero extravaganza, starring Robert Downey Jr. in his fourth turn inside the iron suit — three “solo” films plus a major role in Marvels’ Avengers flick.
Anyway, in Iron Man 3, the bad guy is a global terror mastermind known as Mandarin. The character who, as The Los Angeles Times points out, was created in 1964 by Marvel Comics kingpin Stan Lee and artist Don Heck, was portrayed in the movie by Oscar-winning British actor Ben Kingsley.
The now-70-year-old Kingsley won his Best Actor Academy Award in 1982 for his portrayal of India’s nonviolent revolutionary leader Mohandas Gandhi in the epic biopic, Gandhi.
In Iron Man 3 — and here’s the spoiler, folks, so stop reading right here if you don’t want to be exposed to it — Kingsley plays Mandarin but, as it turns out, he actually doesn’t. In fact, Kingsley, as IGN.com recounts, plays down-and-out actor Trevor Slattery who is hired to pretend to be Mandarin as far as the public is concerned.
A clip from Marvel’s forthcoming, 14-minute short, “All Hail The King” appeared online Friday. Check out the teaser clip above.
The full film will be included as a bonus in the DVD version of Marvel’s recent hit, Thor: The Dark World.
“All Hail The King” is written and directed by Iron Man 3 screenwriter Drew Pearce. In the film, a journalist played by Scoot McNairy, visits Slattery in a maximum security prison to interview him about what it was like to pose as a super-villain. But he finds that the stunt had what could turn out to be grave consequences.
Pearce is a suddenly-hot screenwriter. With mostly TV work prior to writing the Iron Man 3 script, he now has assignments to write the next installments in two other franchise series: Mission Impossible, the Tom Cruise spy-action vehicle; and Sherlock Holmes, which also stars Iron Man 3‘s Robert Downey Jr.
