The final theatrical trailer for Iron Man 3 has arrived: Tony Stark might be outmatched by the Mandarin, but thanks to new technology he’s bringing a ton of back up to the fight.
Embedded above you’ll find the latest trailer for Iron Man 3. The movie hits theaters on May 3, and according to the studio this will be the last big trailer issued before its theatrical debut. It’s only two and a half minutes long, so feel free to hit play. We’ll wait.
Done? Good. As you can see, the key antagonist for this movie is Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin, an international terrorist who hates Tony Stark with a passion and chews scenery like the unholy lovechild of Christopher Walken and Dustin Hoffman circa Hook. Despite this, the Mandarin doesn’t actually seem to be the focus of the film. Instead, the focus lies on Tony Stark’s inner turmoil. As part of the Extremis project he gains the ability to control the Iron Man armors with his mind, but at the same time he’s coming unglued due to myriad personal problems. One of the final shots shows Tony summoning every one of his Iron Man armors for backup, so what we have here is a massively powerful, increasingly unhinged, narcissistic alcoholic with access to anything money can buy and the smarts to build anything that money can’t. That sounds like a pretty solid recipe for drama, no?
Our only concern is how little this resembles the comic book storyline on which it’s supposedly based. Warren Ellis’ Extremis is one of Iron Man’s best, and Ellis is one of our best living writers, no matter the medium. We’ve got a lot of faith in director Shane Black — Kiss Kiss Bang Bang earns him a lifetime pass — but we must keep our fingers crossed that the studio didn’t opt to stray too far from Ellis’ original tale. It doesn’t matter who they have writing this movie; they just won’t be able to craft a better story than Warren Ellis, so here’s hoping screenwriter egos can be set aside and that Iron Man 3 will ape its source material as closely as possible.
Now, with that out of the way, would anyone care to speculate on what we might see after Iron Man 3’s credits roll? Personally I’m hoping for a live action adaptation of that one time Squirrel Girl beat the Latverian stuffing out of Doctor Doom using only her wits and an army of rodents.
