10 Biggest MCU Controversies Ever
2. The Mandarin Twist - Iron Man 3
There are few MCU moments more genuinely surprising than Iron Man 3's Mandarin reveal.
Despite the marketing suggesting that Iron Man would be battling Ben Kingsley's shadowy supervillain the Mandarin, it's revealed mid-way through the film that Kingsley's character is actually Trevor Slattery - an actor hired to portray the Mandarin and provide a smokescreen for the "real" Mandarin, Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce).
Given the Mandarin's stature in the Marvel comics, many fans were deeply, deeply pissed off that an iconic Iron Man villain was seemingly wasted on a "gotcha!" joke.
It didn't help that Killian's take on the Mandarin was itself unpersuasive, and so the very next year, Marvel Studios decided to appease offended fans by releasing a One-Shot short, All Hail the King, to basically retcon Iron Man 3's big twist.
In the short, Slattery gets broken out of prison so that he can meet the real Mandarin, implying that there is a more comic-accurate iteration of the supervillain out there.
And though for a while it seemed like we might never actually see this character in the MCU, he finally turned up in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, shedding his dated, inappropriate original moniker for the name Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung).
Wenwu ended up being one of the MCU's more impressive and statuesque villains to date, so after the better part of a decade fans finally got the Mandarin they wanted.