20 Most Idiotic Film Twists Of All Time

19. The Mandarin Is Just An Actor - Iron Man 3

The Twist: As Tony Stark prepares to launch an assault on the villainous Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), he finds out that the guy's just an actor called Trevor Slattery, who's paid to act as the media propaganda version of the character, a decoy who allows the "real" Mandarin (Guy Pearce's Aldrich Killian) to go about his business undetected.

Why It's Stupid: Because comic book fans went into this movie wanting to see the Mandarin get his due on screen, and everyone else expected to see Ben Kingsley being a totally bada** villain, but neither of these things ended up happening.

There's a certain smugness about the whole twist which rubbed fans up the wrong way, as if doing a straight adaptation of the character wasn't good enough, so the Mandarin had to get the postmodern treatment just for kicks. Instead, Shane Black and Drew Pearce made a mockery of an iconic villain, who likely won't be getting another shot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Though Marvel did attempt to soothe the fanboy hurt somewhat in the All Hail the King short film (where it's revealed that the real Mandarin is waiting in the wings), the Mandarin twist is still a low-point for the MCU to date.