Iron Man 3: What Does Patriotic Armour Suggest About The Plot?

While Avengers Assemble continues to rake in the cash at box office (seriously, if you haven’t watched it by now stop reading this and go watch it now) Marvel is now reading its “Second Wave” of films. Casino Royale villain Mads Mikkelsen has just been cast in Thor 2; Captain America 2 is rumoured to be a Bond spy villain affair and Mark Ruffalo’s turn in Avengers Assemble is said to have the bods at Marvel considering another return to film for the Jade Giant.

And then there’s Iron Man 3…

There were some big reports breaking last night with Latino Review saying that the Mandarin will indeed feature in Iron Man 3 and The Superficial releasing an image of Iron Man armour with an American Flag motif. With a few comic books to hand, let’s try and figure out what we can hope to expect from Iron Man 3 based on these revelations.

If the rumours are true, Iron Man 3 will draw heavily from Warren Ellis’ Iron Man: Extremis storyline. In the comic, Extremis is a process for an updated super soldier serum that uses nanobots to turn its subject into a weapon. After suffering critical injuries fighting a new villain, Tony Stark injects himself with the Extremis process and becomes “post human”, storing part of the suit within the hollows of his own bones. Tony Stark becomes Iron Man, inside and out.

In Iron Man we saw Stark make the suit; in Iron Man 2 we saw him fix it and sort out the palladium poisoning; so it only makes sense that Iron Man 3 draws from the Extremis story to give us a big screen version of the liquid armour suit. Not to mention it’d be pretty sweet to see.

Now we know for a fact that Ben Kingsley has been cast in the film but the role he will play is still surrounded in mystery. We’re putting the smart money on him being the Mandarin, because Latino Review has a good track record in breaking superhero stories. While Marvel continues to deny that Kingsley will play the role of Tony Stark’s greatest foe, we do know that he’ll play a character who “weaves a plot that revolves around the spread of a virus through nanobots.”

Also, Iron Man 3 will be partly shot and co-produced in China which is the home of the fictional villain, and the Ten Rings terrorist organisation has been featured in the first two Iron Man films. The Mandarin uses 10 rings of power as his major source of weaponry. Furthermore, in a later Iron Man comic, Iron Man: Director of S.H.I.E.L.D,the Mandarin works on a plot to unleash Extremis on the world population. Marvel may deny it, but it seems awfully likely that Ben Kingsley will play the Mandarin, working side by side with the film’s main confirmed villain, Aldrich Killian, a geneticist and co-creator of the Extremis process who will be played by Guy Pearce.

But that’s not all…

The Superficial and Coming Soon have reported that we’ll be seeing the red white and blue Iron Patriot armour in the film. Now, in the comics the suit was donned by Norman Osborn in his Dark Avengers days. Obviously Osborn can’t feature in Iron Man 3 due to Sony’s ownership of the Spider-Man franchise, so who will be donning the Patriot armour? The Superficial is claiming it’ll be worn by Eric Savin, aka the cyborg Coldblood, who will be played by James Badge Dale. In the comics, Savin isn’t a character associated with Iron Man. Might it be worn by Don Cheadle in a weird spin on War Machine? At the moment your guess is as good as ours.

If all the rumours are indeed true we could be looking at a superhero film with three villains and the last film I remember doing that was Spider-Man 3 which suffered from trying to juggle them all. In Iron Man 2 when Tony started DJing wearing the suit we started worrying that the series might turn into a Spider-Man 3/Saturday Night Fever dance show but for now, we have faith that the new writer and director to the series, Shane Black will come up good.

Iron Man 3 is scheduled to hit cinemas on 3 May 3 2013.

Carl Anka