Hey guys! Horrorella here...
A few months ago, Sir Ben Kingsley revealed that he had recently shot a "secret project" for Marvel. The nature of the project was left up to speculation, but it seemed likely that he could be reprising his character of The Mandarin for a new short. Now, that theory seems to be confirmed.
EW has released new pics from the upcoming One-Shot, ALL HAIL THE KING. The 14-minute short was written and directed by IRON MAN 3 scribe Drew Pearce, and will be included on the upcoming Blu-ray of THOR: THE DARK WORLD.
The short serves as an epilogue to the events of IRON MAN 3 (so, if by some reason, you still haven't seen it, you might want to just stop reading now).
It is framed within an interview with a documentarian (Scoot McNairy) with Trevor Slattery in prison, covering not only the events of IRON MAN 3, but also Slattery's acting career before he found himself playing the role of The Mandarin (including some truly 80's-tastic television work that I can't wait to see onscreen).
And really, the events of IRON MAN 3 left Slattery in a pretty good position. Says Pearce:
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.
Additionally, the interview raises the question of whether or not The Ten Rings is still out there.
It’s kind of said in Iron Man 3 but very briefly, Aldrich essentially took a thing that was real, historically real and culturally real, and co-opted it for his own means — essentially co-opting an ancient terrorist concept. What [All Hail the King] does is show that everything in Iron Man 1 [involving the terrorist group] was canon all along any way. We kind of knew The Ten Rings were a real terrorist cell.
I really dug the way that Kingsley played the surprisingly bumbling and inept character, and I'm excited that Marvel chose Slattery as the focus for this latest short. I'm looking forward to catching up with him to see how he's doing. Check out the images below. You can check out the short and THOR: THE DARK WORLD on Blu-ray on February 25th.
