THE MANDARIN is the star of Marvel one-shot “All Hail The King.”
So like the thousands of people (myself included) who pegged Loki to be leading the next Marvel one-shot are wrong. Egg on my face! Instead, it’ll be none other than The Mandarin. Or Trevor, rather. But hey I really enjoy the dude’s shtick so I can bounce to that.
For a week now, many Marvel movie fans have been basking in the golden possibility that Loki might be getting his very own short film, perhaps detailing exactly how he took the throne of Asgard and particularly how he dispatched with Odin. It has now been revealed that the secret short accompanying the DVD release of Thor: The Dark World next month actually stars a different villain, with a similar gift for impersonation but a lot less power. Trevor Slattery, the face of the Mandarin.
The short will pick on Slattery in prison, where, screenwriter Drew Pearce points out, he’s basically got everything he ever wanted:
When we find Trevor at the beginning of this short, other than Tony, he’s the only one out of Iron Man 3 to get what he wanted. And even though he was arrested and beat up and had guns pointed at him, now he’s the celebrity that he always wanted to be and he loves it. He absolutely loves it. He is living a somewhat curtailed version of the celebrity life, but he’s also leading arguably a better life than he did when he was living with, like, four other actors at the age of 52 in some bedsit in the south of London. That’s the other fun thing about the starting point is that when we meet Trevor in the short, Trevor won. The Mandarin didn’t, but Trevor in his own way was victorious.
“All Hail the King” will also reveal new details about the Ten Rings, the terrorist group responsible for kidnapping Tony Stark in Iron Man, that were cut from Iron Man 3. And while Pearce is mum for spoiler reasons, he promises appearances from other minor Marvel Cinematic Universe characters, as well as some major developments in Slattery’s situation.