Some diehard comics fans were upset others thought it was ingenious. Shane Black’s decision to make the Mandarin almost a punchline in the film was controversial to say the least. At first, the terrorist attack concept was a ruse to cover up the flaws of his experimental Extremis regenerative program - it’s a pretty big flaw, since it causes its patients to blow up! But Killian soon realized it’s easier to rule behind the scenes, so he created a face of terror… the Mandarin. Killian used this evil think tank to distort the myth of the Mandarin in order to manipulate the pathology of Western Civilization. The Mandarin was actually failed actor Trevor Slattery (Sir Ben Kingsley), hired by Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian, the founder of Advanced Idea Mechanics, or A.I.M. Except, it was all a smokescreen, a “custom-made terror threat” as Tony Stark put it. In the 2013 threequel Iron Man 3, the Mandarin was a looming villain that had America on edge with his pervasive broadcasts and terrifying messages. Regardless, the Mandarin did show up in director Shane Black’s Iron Man 3.
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He also seemed concerned with how to meld the character’s supernatural powers – the ten rings are mystical, otherworldly entities – with the tech-based reality his Iron Man films were grounded in. Favreau knew that the Mandarin in the comics was considered Iron Man’s arch-foe, but he was equally aware of the character’s problematic and racially-insensitive origins. It makes sense, given that Jon Favreau, who directed the first two Iron Man movies, has said he wanted the Mandarin to appear in what he had intended to be his Tony Stark trilogy. However, in 2010’s Iron Man 2 Mickey Rourke’s Ivan Vanko gets his forged documents from a shady member of the Ten Rings. We didn’t get an actual reference to the Mandarin in the first Iron Man or in the sequel. We learn later in the film that it was Stark’s partner and mentor Obadiah Stane who engineered the entire thing, but it was the Ten Rings who carried it out. In 2008’s Iron Man, a faction of the terrorist group the Ten Rings is behind the abduction of Tony Stark in Afghanistan. Let’s start at the beginning, because in many ways the Mandarin helped launch the MCU.