12 Biggest Retcons In The Marvel Cinematic Universe
Howard Stark: warmonger, genius businessman, secret agent, military scientist, average father.
There are only two certainties in comics; death will never be permanent (unless you're Uncle Ben), and eventually everything will be retconned anyway.
Retroactive continuity shifts are the bread-and-butter of long-term comic series, allowing new writers to do whatever the hell like with classic characters, and the two industry giants have actually constructed narrative tricks that make them easier to execute; DC has a multiverse that can fold in on itself whenever it wants to reset everything to an earlier status quo and for the longest time Marvel had a malleable sliding timeline that adjusted the past to fit the present almost constantly (Spider-Man's Clone Saga is terribly, gloriously bonkers).
So when the Marvel Cinematic Universe set about transferring basic narrative tropes of comics to the big screen, specifically the shared world, you could be certain eventually we'd see an awful lot of retconning eventually. To the studio and Kevin Fegie's credit, there's been very few major random changes, but despite them loving to shout how "Everything is connected" and that each piece of media slots into a bigger picture, that doesn't mean things haven't had to be slightly adjusted after the fact just a little bit.
A big cause of this was an uncertainty of how everything would slot together in the early days, with a constantly changing gameplan leading to various inconsistencies that have since been carefully ignored, although some later cases came from simple poor plotting. Here's the twelve biggest retcons (so far).
12. The "Real" Mandarin's Out There (Somewhere)
You'll probably disagree, but Iron Man 3 is pretty great. It's a Shane Black movie through and through, with an irreverent tone, witty characters, sharp (and decidedly un-Marvel) comedy and some of the franchise's best action. And The Mandarin twist, where it's revealed Ben Kingsley's Bin Laden-esque master terrorist is actually a drunk cockney employed by Guy Pearce, is just f*cking brilliant (and stuff).
Fans were... let's say less enthused. Despite the fact a faithful version would be incredibly inappropriate, many objected even more vehemently to Iron Man's biggest nemesis being reduced to a punchline (and I do get it - it'd be like Darth Vader turning up in Rogue One for just a couple of fart gags).
Black has since said he just didn't expect people to be so upset (fair play - before 2008 nobody really gave a sh*t about Tony Stark, evidenced by how much that first film changed his character from the comics), but once the internet exploded Marvel were quick to course-correct. Using the then-popular One-Shot short film series, All Hail The King revealed that there was actually a real Mandarin out there, with Pearce and Kingsley accidentally copying his name and ethos.
Of course, nothing's really come of that since (in any form of media), but it leaves the door open and ensures fans will be a little less pissed off in the long run.