ALL HAIL
THE KING.

A DOCUMENTARY CREW WITH ANOTHER AGENDA

WHAT HAPPENS TO TREVOR SLATTERY AFTER IRON MAN 3

The short finds Trevor Slattery, the actor who played the Mandarin in Iron Man 3, in prison for it. A documentary filmmaker named Jackson Norriss, played by Scoot McNairy, has come to interview him about his career, and for most of its length the short plays as a comedy about a vain, washed-up performer who has found a captive audience.

The interviews turn out to be a pretext. Norriss is a member of the Ten Rings, the criminal organization Slattery had only been pretending to lead, and the short ends with him breaking Slattery out of prison with the tease that a meeting with the real Mandarin is coming. That meeting is never shown. A cameo at the end brings back Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer, the weapons contractor from Iron Man 2.

A TWO-YEAR CAMPAIGN, GRANTED ON THE IRON MAN 3 SET

WHO MADE IT, AND WHY IT STOPPED BEING A PREQUEL

All Hail the King was written and directed by Drew Pearce, who had co-written Iron Man 3 with Shane Black. By his own account he had lobbied hard for the chance: “I hassled Kevin Feige and Louis D’Esposito every day for two years to get them to let me write and direct one.” The opening came on the Iron Man 3 set in North Carolina, where Feige and Pearce turned to each other and wondered aloud whether they should do a Trevor Slattery short. Pearce went back to the hotel that night and wrote a first version.

That first version was not a sequel. In the Iron Man 3 that was filmed, Pearce has said, Slattery steals an Extremis injector, jabs himself and promptly blows up, so the short began as a prequel exploring Slattery’s earlier life. When Slattery survived the final cut, Pearce lost interest in the prequel, arguing that prequels inevitably lack drama, and set the short after the film instead. Joss Whedon helped tip the decision by telling the room that if Sir Ben Kingsley could be persuaded to appear in one of these shorts, this was the one to make. Pearce rewrote the script, and Kingsley agreed.

Shooting took three days in a disused women’s prison on the east side of Los Angeles, in heat Pearce has described as a hundred degrees. He has also said he was surprised by the studio’s attention to the finished short: there was, in his words, no reason for the president of Marvel Studios and its co-president to spend as much time in the edit suite with him as they did.

A SHORT BUILT AROUND THE BACKLASH, OR NOT

APOLOGY OR CONTINUATION: WHAT SHANE BLACK AND DREW PEARCE EACH SAID

The Iron Man 3 entry on this site covers the fan reaction to the Mandarin twist, and the short is often read as Marvel’s answer to it. Shane Black has encouraged that reading, saying in a later interview that Marvel “saw so many negative things they made a whole other movie just to apologize.” Pearce, who wrote it, has been consistently less certain that was the point.

“It’s weird because that was kind of the last thing that was on our minds, certainly my mind.”

Drew Pearce, asked whether the Iron Man 3 backlash shaped All Hail the King

Pearce has said his motivation was the chance to work with Kingsley again, while acknowledging that “some of the reaction plays into the dialogue in it.” He has described the short as joining dots from established lore rather than creating new mythology, and has said it was meant to be the first time viewers see someone in the Ten Rings act genuinely viciously, which is why the action that follows the comic opening is written to feel brutal. The Ten Rings were not an invention of the short: they were already the group that held Tony Stark captive in 2008’s Iron Man.

THE REWATCH

A DISC EXTRA WITH A LONG TAIL

The short reached buyers on 4 February 2014 as a 3D and HD digital download alongside Thor: The Dark World, and on 3D combo pack, Blu-ray, DVD and on demand in the US on 25 February. It was the fifth of Marvel’s original One-Shots, after The Consultant, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer, Item 47 and Agent Carter.

Its closing tease took seven years to pay off. At the premiere of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in August 2021, Kingsley confirmed he was in the film, saying that Marvel’s welcome on Iron Man 3 had been so generous that he was still with the studio. That film introduced Tony Leung’s Wenwu as the real leader of the Ten Rings, and Slattery appears in it as a prisoner of the organization he once impersonated. The short does not need that sequel to work, but it plays differently when you know where the tease was headed.

For viewers working through the catalogue in release order, Marvel One-Shot: All Hail the King sits in the MCU release order guide directly after Thor: The Dark World, and directly before Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It also appears in the MCU timeline guide, where it follows Iron Man 3.