Get a first look and new info on the Marvel One Shot: All Hail The King with Ben Kingsley

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Trevor Slattery is back in the Marvel One-Shot: All Hail The King, which stars Sir Ben Kingsley (as well as ARGO's Scoot McNairy as a documentary filmmaker) as the controversial "villain." IRON MAN 3 screenwriter Drew Pearce sat down with Entertainment Weekly to discuss the 14-minute short, including how they decided to focus on Kingsley's IRON MAN 3 character and just what that means for future Marvel films.

Pearce on why they chose to bring back such a "polarizing" character:

I had spoken to Sir Ben a lot on set because Trevor was a tricky character that everyone was involved with right from the beginning. And it was always a huge risk. I was so grateful to him when he pulled it off after a year of truly worrying about whether we could land that turn. So, 'The Further Adventures of Trevor' was something we had talked about on set all the time, and when we sat down to talk about what the short would be, it was Stephen [Broussard, executive producer of Iron Man 3] and Kevin [Feige, Marvel Studios president] and myself and Joss Whedon and Jeremy Latcham [executive producer of The Avengers.] So we kicked around a bunch of ideas and there were loads of them that we liked, and it was actually Joss who at a certain point went like, “Or you could do the one that has Sir Ben Kingsley in it because you have access to Sir Ben Kingsley.

Pearce on Slattery dealing with the "real" Ten Rings terrorist organization once in prison:

What it’s doing on that level is, it reiterates a bunch of stuff that actually Shane [Black, director and co-writer of Iron Man 3] and I said in our interviews around the movie. There’s lots of exposition in lots of different cuts of Iron Man 3 that, in the end, kind of got snubbed out. 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.

Pearce on the possibility of the short leading into IRON MAN 4:

Oh, it couldn’t possibly. [Laughs.] I think short movies in general, whether they’re Marvel ones or not, you kind of want them to feel like they’re opening you up to a bigger world. Yeah, 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. You know, whether that’s an Iron Man movie or another one going into Phase Two or Three.

Some cool bits here. I think that the reveal of a "real" Mandarin could very much be in the cards here, particularly since Pearce mentioned how Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) pulled from historically real things, which is basically saying that he stole his identity as the Mandarin. The theory has been floating around, but this is the first time it feels like that might actually hold some weight, based on Pearce's comments. Either that or we're going to get a 14-minute comedy sketch from Kingsley, which I doubt.

Marvel One-Shot: All Hail The King will be attached to the THOR: THE DARK WORLD blu-ray/DVD, which hits shelves on February 25, 2014. PREORDER HERE!