To date, Iron Man 3 is the franchise's highest grossing film behind The Avengers. Well-received by critics and clearly a hit with general audiences, the film became an easy target by comic book purists for its twist involving Ben Kingsley's Mandarin. While the Marvel One-Shot All Hail the King would eventually go on to satisfy a number of the enraged by proving the real, non-Aldrich Killian Mandarin is still out there in the MCU, the twist continues to drive some people up a wall over a year after the movie came out. Would it have been awesome to see the comics' Mandarin in his full glory, battling Tony Stark with his Ten Rings of Power? Definitely. But in the context of the film, in which his rings never demonstrate power to set up such in-film expectations, the twist does manage to work for a lot of people, with Ben Kingsley's performance both before and after the big reveal being solid, entertaining work. A year later, this continues to be a talking point for comic fans and will undoubtedly continue to be something deemed worthy of complaining about unless the true Mandarin shows up in an Iron Man sequel or a Dr. Strange film and publicly executes Trevor Slattery. However, the fact that it's done and over with, the movie's come and gone, general audiences took to it and All Hail the King sought to appease those with issues shows that all that can be done is done. No amount of continued protest is going to remove the existing twist from the MCU, so it's best to let it go, hope Marvel saw how attached people can get and look towards the future rather than dwelling on the unchangeable past.
Writer, film enthusiast, part-time gamer and watcher of (mostly) good television located on the fringe of Los Angeles, who now has his own website at www.highdefgeoff.com!
