Iron Man 3's controversial Mandarin gets his own Marvel One Shot in All Hail The King. First details and pictures here...

NB: This post contains spoilers for Iron Man 3

Shane Black and Drew Pearce's handling of The Mandarin may have been one of the most controversial aspects of last summer's Iron Man 3, but Marvel's next One Shot will see Ben Kingsley reprise the role one more time.

The 14-minute short will be part of the extras on Thor: The Dark World's Blu-ray disc, and will provide a brief coda to the events of Iron Man 3, according to Entertainment Weekly.

It'll see Kingsley's Mandarin (or to give him his real name, Trevor Slattery) in Seagate maximum security prison and held to account for his actions in Iron Man 3 - namely, pretending to be the leader of The Ten Rings group. And in a wry reflection of the disgruntled reaction to The Mandarin's identity displayed by some fans, the real members of the group aren't at all happy.

“Imagine a real terrorist organization whose beliefs were long held and religious for thousands of years, and imagine a drunk, British actor coming along and essentially telling the world that he’s the face of your organization,” writer Drew Pearce told EW.
“I think they would be right to be quite angry.”

The film sees Slattery interviewed by a documentary filmmaker (played by Monsters and Argo's Scoot McNairy), and helps us catch up with what happened after Iron Man 3's end credits, while at the same time clarifying some of the plot points briefly brought up in the film itself - including Aldrich Killian's co-opting of The Ten Rings to further his own wicked plans.

"What [All Hail The King] does is show that everything in Iron Man 1 [involving the terrorist group] was canon all along any way," Pearce says. "We kind of knew The Ten Rings were a real terrorist cell."

As for whether All Hail The King leads into a potential Iron Man 4, Pearce remained tight-lipped, though he did concede that, "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."

You can see some preview images from All Hail The King below (we love the poster of Slattery as King Lear in the second one - "Toast of Croydon", indeed).