10 Movies That Were Only Made With VERY WEIRDLY SPECIFIC Conditions
6. The Main Villain Had To Be Male - Iron Man 3
Iron Man 3 is one of the MCU's most divisive movies, if only for the fact that director Shane Black decided to bait-and-switch audiences expecting to see a more traditional rendition of comic book supervillain The Mandarin.
Instead, the apparent Mandarin was really a paid stooge named Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), while the self-anointed "real" Mandarin was Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce).
But this wasn't always the plan, and earlier drafts of the script actually had Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) as the primary antagonist.
Yet, as Black himself confirmed, a memo came down from then-Marvel CEO Isaac Perlmutter, insisting that the main villain had to be a man, because boys don't buy toys of female antagonists, apparently. In Black's own words:
"All I'll say is this, on the record: there was an early draft of Iron Man 3 where we had an inkling of a problem. Which is that we had a female character who was the villain in the draft. We had finished the script and we were given a no-holds-barred memo saying that cannot stand and we've changed our minds because, after consulting, we've decided that toy won't sell as well if it’s a female... So, we had to change the entire script because of toy making."
Rebecca Hall wasn't exactly thrilled at her role being diminished either. Thankfully Perlmutter was kicked out of Marvel's film division in 2015, whereby Kevin Feige was given full creative control, resulting in a few quality female villains showing up since.