Iron Man 3 fans, we’re going to assume you’ve all seen the movie by now because you can’t learn about Marvel’s new short film without being exposed to a few spoilers.
With a take surpassing $409 million, Iron Man 3 was 2013’s second-highest grossing movie . Only The Hunger Games: Catching Fire bested the Marvel Comics superhero extravaganza, starring Robert Downey Jr. in his fourth turn inside the iron suit — three “solo” films plus a major role in Marvels’ Avengers flick.
Anyway, in Iron Man 3 , the bad guy is a global terror mastermind known as Mandarin. The character who, as The Los Angeles Times points out, was created in 1964 by Marvel Comics kingpin Stan Lee and artist Don Heck , was portrayed in the movie by Oscar-winning British actor Ben Kingsley.
The now-70-year-old Kingsley won his Best Actor Academy Award in 1982 for his portrayal of India’s nonviolent revolutionary leader Mohandas Gandhi in the epic biopic, Gandhi .
In Iron Man 3 — and here’s the spoiler, folks, so stop reading right here if you don’t want to be exposed to it — Kingsley plays Mandarin but, as it turns out, he actually doesn’t. In fact, Kingsley, as IGN.com recounts, plays down-and-out actor Trevor Slattery who is hired to pretend to be Mandarin as far as the public is concerned.
A clip from Marvel’s forthcoming, 14-minute short, “All Hail The King” appeared online Friday. Check out the teaser clip above.
The full film will be included as a bonus in the DVD version of Marvel’s recent hit, Thor: The Dark World .
“All Hail The King” is written and directed by Iron Man 3 screenwriter Drew Pearce . In the film, a journalist played by Scoot McNairy, visits Slattery in a maximum security prison to interview him about what it was like to pose as a super-villain. But he finds that the stunt had what could turn out to be grave consequences.
Pearce is a suddenly-hot screenwriter. With mostly TV work prior to writing the Iron Man 3 script, he now has assignments to write the next installments in two other franchise series: Mission Impossible , the Tom Cruise spy-action vehicle; and Sherlock Holmes , which also stars Iron Man 3 ‘s Robert Downey Jr.
