10 Terrible Movie Super Villains Which Deserve Another Attempt
3. The Mandarin
Iron Man may never have been Marvel's best-selling comic book series, but the MCU has proved that the character has an awful lot more to offer than a secondary role in Spider-Man cartoons or Avengers adventures.
One of the largest challenges in turning a much smaller comic book into the torch-bearer of the MCU is scaling up the villains to match the hero's power, and while the first Iron Man movie was able to appropriately do so, Iron Man 2 simply couldn't measure up.
When it was announced that Iron Man's longtime arch-nemesis The Mandarin would be the main antagonist of Iron Man 3 and decorated actor Ben Kingsley was taking on the role, it was met with a lot of excitement from fans.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere: "My name is Trevor."
Reducing The Mandarin to nothing more than an idea and an actor with a substance-abuse problem may have seemed like the solution to Marvel's problem, but it felt like little more than a slap in the face to long-time Iron Man fans.
Given Iron Man's fate in the MCU, it seems unlikely that we'll see a real iteration of The Mandarin, but the villain really deserves another chance.