10 Things Everyone Always Gets Wrong About Iron Man

4. Iron Man 3 Is A Bad Movie

Marvel Studios

When Shane Black signed on to co-write and direct Iron Man 3, Marvel fans were justifiably excited. The director is famed for his work on the Lethal Weapon franchise, action films The Last Boy Scout and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and for contributing to 1987's Predator. The main takeaway from all of that was that Black was accustomed to working with larger-than-life characters, and when it comes to the comic book medium, they don't get much larger than Tony Stark.

Critical consensus dictates that Iron Man 3 is considered a good movie - and it is - but it was considered to be somewhat divisive by fans, who deemed Black's reimagining of the Mandarin to be inferior to the original character. It's important to be clear, however, that the original Mandarin of the comics just doesn't have a place anymore; he was a Fu Manchu-esque caricature who has no business with modern day Marvel, and of all the ways Black could have reimagined that villain, having Aldrich Killian be the 'real' version of the character was actually pretty clever.

The other great thing about Iron Man 3 is that it actually feels like a Shane Black movie. There's the buddy-cop dynamic shared between Rhodey and Stark, an honest appraisal of Stark's mental state after the Battle of New York that broaches themes surrounding PTSD, and Stark himself grows as a character by the time the credits begin to roll.

It's actually one of the MCU's better films, which is why it's such a shame that it's considered so divisive.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.