As every comic fan on the planet pretty much guessed, the next Marvel One Shot short film, which will be arriving on the “Thor: The Dark World” Blu-ray, is “All Hail The King” and it will mark the return of the divisive Mandarin to the Marvel-verse. Played with glee by Ben Kingsley, some fans were upset when (spoilers) it turned out the super villain was actually Trevor Slattery, a rumpled aspiring actor doing nothing more than filling a role that was part of a master plan by Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) (spoilers over). Mandarin wasn’t a fearsome villain, just some guy with delusional dreams, roped into something criminal. And we’ll be learning a lot more about him.
EW has the first images and details on the Drew Pearce written-and-directed short film, that finds Slattery now imprisoned at Seagate (Luke Cage alert!) where he sits down for a documentary filmmaker (played by Scoot McNairy) and shares stories from his colorful past. And even behind bars, Slattery seems to be loving every moment of attention he’s getting.
“When we find Trevor at the beginning of this short, other than Tony [Stark], 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,” Pearce explains. “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.”
And naturally, this being a Marvel production, there are some cameo appearances in this one from other characters, while the door is left open for this short to be tied into the bigger cinematic universe. “I definitely think there are—the non-spoiler way for me to say it—by the end of the short, there are definitely a lot of exciting other places that are brought up in it that could then go in the Marvel universe,” Pearce explained. “You know, whether that’s an Iron Man movie or another one going into Phase Two or Three.”
See for yourself how it all plays out when “All Hail The King” arrives on the “Thor: The Dark World” home video release on February 25th. New images below.
