Kevin Feige Explains Why The Mandarin Wasn’t In Any Iron Man Movies

When Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings hits theaters in September, it’ll both introduce a brand new superhero into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and tie back to the franchise’s two earliest films, with The Incredible Hulk‘s Abomination confirmed to return, and Iron Man‘s archenemy the Mandarin positioned as the big bad.

The Ten Rings were introduced in the MCU’s very first installment, refitted as a terrorist organization responsible for the capture of Tony Stark, and secretly funded by Obadiah Stane all along. From there, the comic book favorite’s ultimate foe was never mentioned again until his third solo outing, which featured a plot twist that’s still debated to this day.

It looked as though Ben Kingsley was the Mandarin, before the divisive reveal that the fearsome terrorist was a ruse concocted by Aldrich Killian, who hired jobbing and substance-dependent actor Trevor Slattery to play the role. But this was then swiftly retconned in One-Shot All the Hail the King, where it’s confirmed the Mandarin is very real, and not best pleased at seeing his identity used for other means.

Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings Photos Tease An Action-Packed Ride

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Tony Leung is technically billed as Wenwu in Shang-Chi, but the Mandarin has been confirmed as one of his many aliases. In a new interview, Kevin Feige explained why the Iron Man franchise neglected to feature a true interpretation of the character’s most famous adversary, and why now was the right time.

“That’s what’s fun about the MCU at this stage. We can do something like Shang-Chi, introducing a brand new hero into the MCU and into the world at large. But that subtitle, The Legend of the Ten Rings, actually connects it back to the very beginning of the MCU, the Ten Rings being the organization that kidnapped Tony Stark at the very beginning of Iron Man one. And that organization was inspired by a character called the Mandarin in the comics.”

And going back to Iron Man 1, we’ve been talking about that when we do bring this character to the screen, we only wanted to do it when we felt we could do it supreme justice and really showcase the complexity of this character, which frankly we couldn’t do in an Iron Man movie because an Iron Man movie is about Iron Man; an Iron Man movie is about Tony Stark. So Shane Black, in his film and his script that he co-wrote, came up with this fun twist that we love to this day, and it turned out to be Trevor Slattery. Just because that version wasn’t real didn’t mean there’s not a leader of the Ten Rings organization, and that is who we meet for the first time in Shang-Chi.”

Of course, another obvious reason is that a straightforward depiction of the Mandarin lifted straight from Marvel Comics wouldn’t play too well with modern audiences, not to mention that the Iron Man series was much more interested in the technological and scientific than mystical and supernatural.

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Liam Neeson Says His Wife Warned Him Against Playing James Bond

Given the character’s status as a cinema icon and one of the most coveted roles in the business, a media circus inevitably ensues every time a new actor is being sought to assume the mantle of James Bond. Once No Time to Die is finally released in October the cycle will begin anew, while the continued rise of the internet and social media in the fifteen years since Daniel Craig was first appointed means that there’s going to be more speculation than ever before.

Of course, the audition process for 007 has generated countless headlines and column inches dating back decades, so it’s hardly a new phenomenon. One of the most important casting decisions the franchise ever had to make came when Goldeneye was looking for its leading man following the conclusion of the brief, yet sorely underrated, Timothy Dalton era.

The six-year gap between License to Kill and Pierce Brosnan’s debut remains the longest in Bond history dating right back to Sean Connery’s Dr. No, during which many names were considered. One of them was Liam Neeson, and in a new interview the veteran star revealed that his then-girlfriend Natasha Richardson would have refused to marry him if he’s ended up taking the plunge as the secret agent.

“They approached me. I believe I got a couple of calls from Barbara Broccoli, who’s now the main producer of the Bond films. This was after I had done Schindler’s List, which was 26 years ago, but I wasn’t offered it. I know they were looking at various actors, and I apparently was among them. However, my dear, departed wife did say to me, ‘Darling, if you’re offered James Bond and you’re going to play it, you’re not going to marry me’.”

Brosnan was always studio MGM’s number one choice for Goldeneye‘s James Bond, but contingency plans had to be put in place after he’d previously agreed to star in The Living Daylights almost a decade earlier before his TV show Remington Steele was renewed, and he couldn’t get out of his contract. Neeson was coming off the back of a career-best performance and Academy Award nomination for Schindler’s List at the time and would have been a solid pick, although he made his way to the pinnacle of the action genre eventually.

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Fast & Furious 9 Director Spoke To NASA Before Heading To Outer Space

The Fast & Furious franchise has been gradually loosening its grip on reality for a decade, so nobody was surprised in the slightest when it was confirmed that the ninth installment would be boldly going where the series had never gone before, finally giving fans the trip to outer space they’d been clamoring to see for years.

How does it happen? Obviously, Tyrese’s Roman Pearce and Ludacris’ Tej suit up in scuba gear to sit behind the wheel of a rocket-powered Pontiac Fiero and launch from the roof of a cargo plane. What happens when they get there? Naturally, they crash straight into a rogue satellite and blow it to smithereens. Space travel is incredibly intricate and complicated, so how do they navigate? With the steering wheel and pedals, of course.

Incredibly, despite how insanely preposterous the entire scene is, director Justin Lin revealed in a recent interview that he’d actually spoken to people from NASA about the logistics of sending a beaten up car beyond the stars, and it’s no surprise to find out that the professionals were more than a little incredulous.

“Going to space was not something I took for granted or I was very flippant about. It is something that I did have a lot of conversations about. A lot of conversations. And it went from rocket scientists laughing, going, ‘What the f*ck?’, to us saying, ‘Well, can this really happen? If other rocket scientists have to get up there and the capsules are coated with these polymers? Blah blah blah’. This is something that was thought out. If anything, logistically, scientifically, it’s one of the most sound action set pieces in our franchise.”

Fast & Furious 9 Gallery

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If John Cena can zipline from one end of Edinburgh to the other in a completely straight line via several strategically placed harpoon guns without people questioning the physics and logistics behind it, then Lin arguably didn’t need to speak to the folks at NASA about Fast & Furious 9‘s trip outside our atmosphere. He did, though, and while it’s hardly going to be lauded for scientific accuracy and realism, there is at least some basis in fact that makes one of the wildest moments in the entire Fast Saga one of the most feasible, which sums up the entire appeal of the brand nicely.

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