Kevin Feige’s confirmation of the Mandarin is fueling this Shang-Chi rumor

Plans for a (real) Mandarin may be underway in the MCU, as confirmed by Kevin Feige, and it has some people thinking there’s a major twist coming in the Shang-Chi movie.

The first rule of Marvel Club is never talk about Marvel leaks to Kevin Feige. He probably won’t answer your question, so it’s probably not worth it. But, if you are part of the bold and the brave, he just may bestow upon you some new information that you’d never expect. This is evident by Feige’s Reddit Ask Me Anything Wednesday night when he confirmed that the “real” Mandarin is headed to the MCU.

Feige’s answer was brief — one-word brief, as in “yes” — but his “yes” covered a lot of ground as far as confirming new information.

Here’s what the Redditor asked the Marvel Studios president during his AMA:

"Hey Kevin! Thanks for speaking with us today!Without going ino [sic] to details about developing projects, are there any plans to incorporate the Ten Rings from the first Iron Man, or the “real” Mandarin teased in “All Hail the King” in the future?"

Technically, this post has two questions for Feige to answer. The first of it being, will the Ten Rings group return? The second of it being, would the “real” Mandarin appear in the future? Since the two are linked either way (and Feige didn’t deny either question), we’ll just take it that he meant yes to both the Ten Rings and the Mandarin returning.

As mentioned in the question, we did get some backgrounded information about all this during the Iron Man 3 one shot, All Hail the King. The fake Mandarin, Trevor Slattery (portrayed by Ben Kingsley), is interviewed in this short film and learns about the person who he’s been imitating. In the one shot, Slattery learns:

"[The Mandarin] was a warrior king inspired by generations of men through the Middle Ages, perhaps even further back in time."

By the end of the one shot (spoilers if you haven’t seen it and want to see it) we learn that the Ten Rings is still active, the real Mandarin is alive, and he wants to meet with the fake Mandarin. Nothing else happens beyond that, but it does set up that he’s stilling pulling strings behind the scenes… he just wasn’t responsible for Aldrich Killian’s destruction during the third Iron Man film.

With this character confirmed, some seem to think that it is also confirming a rumor about the upcoming Marvel movie Shang-Chi. To be clear, Feige did not confirm that the Mandarin will be in Shang-Chi (as the Reddit question did not mention the movie), but as of now, it’s the only movie in production that makes sense for his character to be in.

As the rumors go, there are two possible routes for the Mandarin to take. The first, and most likely, is that he would be the main villain in the movie. The more grain-of-salt rumor, as mentioned on r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers, is that the Mandarin will be Shang-Chi’s father. The latter would certainly be a twist à la Spider-Man: Homecoming, but it may play out well if we know from the get-go that the Mandarin is his father. (Although, who’s to say the Mandarin can’t the villain and his father in the movie?)

Not much else has been released about Shang-Chi, though Feige confirmed in the AMA that we’ll know more about the future phases of the MCU soon. We have a feeling that with San Diego Comic-Con coming in July, Marvel Studios will take that opportunity to showcase its next slate of films and more.