While Iron Man 3 made a ton of money at the box office ($1.215 billion, to be exact), it’s still regarded as one of the lesser Marvel flicks. That’s because of the way it presented one of the most iconic Iron Man villains of all time - a joke, a twist that infuriated all of the fans. And, as writer and director, Shane Black took most of the blame.
But it shouldn't have been this way, according to the director himself. During an interview with Uproxx, the director revealed that the final product was completely changed from his original version. Thus, Stéphanie Szostak's Brandt became just a simple enforcer for Aldrich Killian, while Rebecca Hall's Maya Hansen became a less than secondary character.
But how big were these two characters supposed to be? Shane Black doesn't reveal that. However, he says that his version of Iron Man 3 was supposed to feature a female villain:
All I'll say is this, on the record: There was an early draft of Iron Man 3 where we had an inkling of a problem. Which is that we had a female character who was the villain in the draft. We had finished the script and we were given a no-holds-barred memo saying that cannot stand and we've changed our minds because, after consulting, we've decided that toy won't sell as well if it's a female.
So, they started out with something completely different from what we wound up seeing. And the original premise would have been a change, since the MCU hasn't featured a main female antagonist just yet. But, hey! This is an industry - and if the statistics say that a female figurine won't sell as well as a male figurine"¦
As far as the huge Mandarin twist is concerned, Shane Black said that Marvel didn't know that the villain was as iconic as, for example, the Joker is to Batman. And that is why they played with him. Thus, when Iron Man 3 came out and all the negative comments were unleashed, Marvel sought to make things right. How did the studio do that?
According to Shane Black, this was the reason why All Hail the King was released - to tell the fans that there was indeed a real Mandarin and that he was pissed off.
