10 MCU Plot Points Marvel Has Completely Abandoned

9. The Real Mandarin's Identity

iron man 3 ben kingsley mandarin
Marvel Studios

Iron Man 3's marketing made us all think we were going to get a menacing, violent and sadistic villain in Ben Kingsley's The Mandarin, but about halfway through the film, this was all revealed to be a ruse.

Kingsley was playing an actor by the name of Trevor Slattery (a man who was simply pretending to be The Mandarin) and in the third act, Guy Pearce's Aldrich Killian claims that it's he who is the real Mandarin - before being whacked in the face by Pepper.

But then, to complicate things even further, Marvel released a One-Shot titled All Hail The King, which posited that the true Mandarin was still out there somewhere, and that neither Killian nor Slattery had any true claim to that villainous name.

However, since that One-Shot debuted... we've heard literally nothing about The Mandarin, his true identity, or why Killian chose to steal that name in the first place.

Admittedly, it may be hard to feature the character in the MCU considering the movies are now more focused on cosmic threats, but it was strange that Marvel made such a big deal out of this, only to drop it without a second thought.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!