After the news broke last week that there would be a Ben Kingsley Marvel one-shot, naysayers spoke out decrying that it was a false rumor and probably untrue. That comes thanks to the fact that people don’t like to trust Latino Review, despite the fact that they are right a lot of the time. This time, the idea of fact or fiction remains unclear.
Spoilers follow for Iron Man 3.
To catch you up to date, the rumors were that a Ben Kingsley Marvel one-shot was on the way and the short was going to have Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery in jail and the real Mandarin come out of hiding, angry that Slattery and Aldrich Killian were using his name to further their agenda.
That would suck. For one thing, The Mandarin would be a pretty horrible villain the movies based on the fact that he is an outdated, racial caricature to begin with. I am sure they could update him, but the fans who hated generic villains would have hated him being updated as well.
To be honest, when it comes to The Mandarin, it was a no-win situation because nothing Marvel could have done could make fans happy when it comes to that character because The Mandarin in the new comics is another evil businessman.
For another thing, the reveal that Ben Kingsley was actually a weasel actor pretending to be an uber-terrorist so the media could scare the public into fearing him while the real villains were working behind the scenes was brilliant (and the exact same as what happened in the real world with Osama Bin Laden – while he was painted as the ultra-villain, look at everything that was done to the world while we were preoccupied with hunting him).
Kingsley agrees with the brilliance of the twist as well. When asked about the Marvel one-shot he said this:
“I haven’t heard anything at all about this. So it’s in progress. It will have to remain under wraps. Marvel was so brilliant in the way they kept the transition from the Mandarin to Trevor Slattery in Iron Man 3. They were absolutely brilliant at it. I so respect the way they dearly want to surprise their audiences. But we will just have to leave it in the realm of rumor.”
So, he says he hasn’t heard anything but it is in progress. I really hope they don’t bring in a real Mandarin. Kingsley’s character was too much like Bane, to begin with, in Iron Man 3 until they had the brilliant twist. But, like I said earlier, people would complain no matter what they did in the movie, even if they did pull out the racial joke that is the comic book Mandarin.
Source: VanityFair.com
