Iron Man Sequels Mandarin Maybe Reintroduced in Iron Man 4

[fan4stic]

His tech rings or powers was never the problem. How to portray the Mandarin's ethnicity without offending some portion of the audience and perhaps trashing all of Marvel Studios if not Disney is the problem

You can keep his ethnicity and not make him a stereotype or racially offensive.

 

[2002SpideyFan]

Aldrich Killian is a much more faithful rendition than an immortal sorcerer.

Aldrich Killian is played by an Australian actor, has none of the powers that the original Mandarin possess, none of his personality, none of his motivations, and none of his... Well, nothing, basically. Because he's not the Mandarin, duh.

The Mandarin, in the comics, is not an immortal sorcerer.

That is rather debatable. In the comics he does sorcery-esque things. Especially during the Hands of the Mandarin. He was pretty much like Voldemort. And while he's not immortal, he can never really die, because he managed to resurrect himself plenty of times. Primarily, it's because, as long as his rings are functional, they can contain his soul and Mandarin can resurrect himself by using someone's body as his avatar in case his original body gets destroyed. Again, pretty much like Voldemort.

 

[2002SpideyFan]

Agreed. In fact, Black seems to "get" the Mandarin in a way a lot of the complainers don't.

I hardly doubt that Shane Black would get the character, for which he has nothing but disdain, better than the people who actually respect the character. After all, Shane Black once said that the Mandarin was created in the 50s. He also called him a communist. The dude didn't even bother to open a Wiki.

The Mandarin was a rich aristocrat who spent all of his people's money turning himself into an ubermensche super-soldier, kind of Black Mask meets Iron Fist.

Mandarin was also raised during 1920s in the heart of China by a misanthropic aunt that inserted her cynical views into him to make stand against the entire world. I can't remember that ever being present in Iron Man 3.

Killian is a lot closer to that than the Ra's Al Ghul type the complainers keep begging for.

That's obviously a bunch of BS, because the comparisons between Mandy and Ra's are completely logical, as it is no secret that Dennis O'Neil, who worked on an IM title for four years, have been a fan of Iron Man since Tales of Suspense era and he in fact used some of Mandarin's traits for Ra's Al Ghul.

 

[2002SpideyFan]

"People look at what Black did, they see that he didn't adapt many of the banal surface details"

By "banal surface level details" you mean "he made character absolutely nothing like the character in the source material"? Because that's what he did.

"and they take that to mean that he didn't understand or care about the character."

Because he did not. He said he hates the Mandarin as a character. He also called him a communist, which is the same as calling Spider-Man a bad guy. The guy's a hack. If Iron Man 3 didn't prove it, his godawful Predator sequel sure as hell did.

They don't see that he captured the soul of the character

The soul of the Mandarin is displayed in the John Byrne's Iron Man, where Mandarin is shown as a collected, Wuxia-inspired bad guy who is driven by philosophical motives of power and its complete accumulation to build a perfect world. Aldrich Killian was yet another greedy white businessman who wanted to make profit by fooling US government. Been there, done that. Twice.

all while managing to take the racially insensitive and logistically difficult aspects of the character

Pretty much stripping character from anything that makes him a character. And I'm not sure this BS talk about "racially insensitive" has any meaning after MCU released a Spider-Man movie where an underage girl makes a joke about wanting to have sex with an adult man. A joke that was written by middle-aged man who thought it would be funny. If you people can stomach that, I'm sure Mandarin's so-called "racial insensitivity" won't be a big problem for that. I sure as hell am more comfortable with the Mandarin the way he is in the comics than with a bunch of hack writers thinking pedo jokes are super funny. (Hi there, James Gunn.)

and turning them on their head into narrative strengths that were woven into a coherent and effective story.

Hardly coherent when the entire point behind that so-called story relies on its main character being an utter moron, because the film wouldn't even happen if Tony Stark acted like a logical person and didn't ask bad guys to come and bomb his house without trying to create any defense tactics for that, despite him having an army of hyper-advanced, self-controlled suits under his house.

That's just about as good as movie adaptations of things get.

If you are willing to accept any terrible change the MCU does to the source material just because of its brand name, maybe. To the rest of the comic fans, who are not brand followers, I'm afraid we do not share this sentiment.

 

[Lone]

Now that Feige has confirmed the REAL Mandarin will be introduced in the future, I hope they cast Andy Lau as him.

Spoiler

Still sucks that we won’t get to see Tony Stark face off against him though.