So you waited in line all night to catch Iron Man 3 in theaters, you’ve had a full night to sleep on it, the time has come to discuss what you thought about the film, including it’s many bombshell spoilers.
Iron Man 3 spoilers are about to slam into the internet in full force, but since our readers are still good people, we’ve created a special discussion thread just for those of you that want to talk about the movie without worrying about whether or not a poor uninformed soul will wander across and have Iron Man 3 ruined for them.
The comments section of this post will serve as the discussion board (or you can take it to the forums), and we’re excited to hear all of your thoughts regarding Iron Man 3.
To give the arena a good jumping off point, let’s throw some light on the biggest Iron Man 3 spoilers.
The Mandarin
Definitely the bombshell that will define the events of Iron Man 3 was the big reveal that The Mandarin wasn’t everything he appeared to be on television. According to Ben Kingsley’s answer to our question, this twist was a big part of Iron Man 3‘s identity from the beginning.
Shane Black has called the character in the comics a “racist caricature,” so it might have been safe to assume from the beginning that we wouldn’t see magical rings or a fu manchu. Once we saw and heard Ben Kingsley in the first trailer however, fans began to get excited about the change that Mandarin was undergoing for Iron Man 3. In Shane Black’s words from the Iron Man 3 press conference, the Mandarin was meant to serve as a “myth,” some thing that was “all things to all people.”
What we didn’t know until we watched the film, was the revelation that the character of The Mandarin was indeed, a myth.
We never get to find out about his Captain America-esque tattoo (pictured left), and we barely see more then ten minutes of him as “The Mandarin” before he turns into “The Actor.” This came as a shock to a few fans who were expecting the type of showdown that the TV spots were promising, but still, it’s nice to find a true surprise about a movie in an age where we know everything about it before we get to the theater.
We’ve got a particularly Mandarin-y TV spot below, just for comparison.
Spoiler: In the end, it isn’t just “you and me.”
Iron Man is healed, but Tony Stark will return
Iron Man 3 opens and closes with bookended monologues by Tony Stark. At the end, Tony undergoes surgery to get the final pieces of shrapnel out of his chest (something we think it might have been smart to consider earlier), and it’s implied that he’s done being Iron Man.
Then the movie ends and we see a savior of white text: Tony Stark will return.
We already know that Marvel is eyeing the possibility of Iron Man 4, and we’re hoping that we’ll see Robert Downey Jr. as the billionaire genius playboy philanthropist in Avengers 2, but all that seems to be up in the air. We still have two more years and three more movies to go before then, so anything can happen.