While this coming week’s Marvel Studios’ “Black Widow” kicks off the ‘fourth phase’ of the MCU, it’s really “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” that gets the ball rolling.
The film sees Tony Leung step into the role of the villain Wenwu, the leader of the Ten Rings organisation and father of the film’s titular hero (played by Simu Liu).
Wenwu is also inspired by legendary Marvel Comics villain The Mandarin with that being one of many names Leung’s character has been known by in the past.
He arrives on screen eight years after Ben Kingsley played a version of The Mandarin in “Iron Man 3,” but in a twist reveal Kingsley’s version was shown to be a British actor named Trevor Slattery who had been hired by Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce).
That reveal was a polarizing one, inspiring laughter at its boldness from critics and non-fans, and outright fury from plenty of Marvel devotees who felt robbed of seeing one of the most famed baddies of the comics turned into essentially a joke.
Recently, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige spoke about The Mandarin’s inclusion in “Shang-Chi” and he tells Rotten Tomatoes that he stands by what they did in the third “Iron Man” and there was good reason they couldn’t do it at time:
“Going back to Iron Man 1: We’ve been talking about that when we do bring this character to the screen, [we] only wanted to do it when we felt we could do it supreme justice and really showcase the complexity of this character, which frankly we couldn’t do in an Iron Man movie because an Iron Man movie is about Iron Man; an Iron Man movie is about Tony Stark.
So Shane Black, in his film and his script that he co-wrote, came up with this fun twist that we love to this day, and it turned out to be Trevor Slattery. Just because that version wasn’t real didn’t mean there’s not a leader of the Ten Rings organization, and that is who we meet for the first time in Shang-Chi.”
In the wake of “Iron Man 3,” the Marvel One-Shot “All Hail the King” was released and confirmed a legitimate The Mandarin was out there and not pleased with how Trevor Slattery mocked his name.
Whether there’ll be any passing mention of the “Iron Man 3” connection in the new film is not clear, but one MCU connection that is confirmed by Feige himself is “The Incredible Hulk” bad guy The Abomination is in the new film and can be seen in the recent trailer participating in a cage fight.
“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” arrives in cinemas on September 3rd.