I’ll be honest, with all this talk about The Avengers, Batman, Superman, etc., I kind of forgot that Shane Black was directing Iron Man 3. Awesome, right? As long as Marvel doesn’t make him start shooting before the script is finished, anyway. Well now it seems Sir Ben Kingsley (“Special K” as we call him here in America) is in talks to play one of the villains. Which is great because everyone knows Special K is the smoothest brother around.
Kingsley, however, will not be the primary villain, according to insiders, and it is not clear what role he will play.
Insiders say there is a chance Kingsley will play the Mandarin, but because the script is still being written, the character might be reconfigured for silver-screen presentation. The Mandarin’s classic traits might be merged with a nanotechnological virus seen in a storyline titled “Extremis,” sources have said.
The update will be necessary. The Mandarin, a Chinese ruler who worked with the communists, was introduced in 1963 — a different era from today when China is one of the world’s most important film markets.
Additionally, his power initially came from 10 alien rings. Since DC hero Green Lantern also had his power from an alien ring, Marvel will no doubt want to distance itself from any similarity. [THR]
It’s hilarious the way news about comic book movies gets grown men arguing about whether Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman, but as long as we’re playing make-believe, a cursory skim of Wikipedia shows that the Mandarin was supposedly the child of “one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary mainland China” and an English noblewoman, while Ben Kingsley (born Krishna Pandit Bhanji) himself is the son of a Gujarati Indian doctor and an English actress. So maybe they’re changing “The Mandarin” to “The Punjab,” or something. That would keep from pissing off China, that friend that everyone secretly hates but can’t say anything bad about because he’ll take back all the stuff he loaned you.