"It’s not exactly the Ritz, is it?"
Trevor Slattery, the "villain" Sir Ben Kingsley played in Shane Black’s Iron Man 3, is back in action in the Marvel One-Shot All Hail the King. We have been reporting on this seemingly important short film for weeks, banking on the fact that it might share a little more information on the REAL identity of The Mandarin. Well now we have an exclusive look at the beginning of the short, right here...
What are we seeing? Scoot McNairy (of Argo) is playing a documentary filmmaker who is trying to get to the heart of Trevor’s identity. He admits that the man is simply an actor who pretended to be The Mandarin, and we learned in Iron Man 3 that Guy Pearce’s character IN FACT was the Mandarin all along. Or was he? There were hints and suggestions in an earlier EW interview saying that Marvel maybe is keeping a secret stashed up its sleeve that Trevor and Aldrich Killian were stealing the identity of an ACTUAL Mandarin.
Or maybe not. Maybe I’m just holding out hope because I was disappointed in the way I thought Black and crew handled what should have been Iron Man’s chief nemesis.
But why stir that pot again if we don’t have to?
The One-Shot introduction stops short of Trevor actually telling us anything important. I’m guessing the "meat" of this short still waist or us in the clip. Maybe Trevor, while in prison, runs into members of The Ten Rings, and realizes what a mistake it was to impersonate a legit threat like The Mandarin. It was suggested a few weeks back that the new short All Hail the King could lead to a fourth Iron Man movie. Will that possibly bring the Mandarin back into the fold, in proper form?
We’ll know more very soon. The short film All Hail the King will be a part of the upcoming Thor: The Dark World DVD and Blu-ray release. Where it builds from there is anyone’s guess. The Seagate prison references in the short could lead to new Marvel Netflix shows. They could all feed into Avengers: Age of Ultron. The future is bright for Marvel… and the foundation keeps getting stronger.
