If you were lucky, you were one of the people who got to see Marvel’s latest One-Shot short film ‘All Hail The King’ earlier this week before it’s released on the ‘Thor: The Dark World’ Blu-Ray on February 25th. And if you did get to watch the return of Ben Kingsley to the Marvel Cinematic Universe before it was taken down, then you surely have a ton of questions about what went down. Well, ‘Iron Man 3’ writer Drew Pearce, who also wrote this short, has a few answers for you.

I must warn you. If you haven’t seen ‘All Hail The King’ yet, then you should not proceed because there are huge SPOILERS for the film ahead. Anyway, if you’re still reading, then you know that Kingsley reprises his role as Trevor Slattery, the actor hired by Aldrich Killian and A.I.M. to portray the maniacal terrorist known as The Mandarin. In the film, we catch up with the character as he spends time in Seagate Prison and meets with a documentary filmmaker with an extensive knowledge about the terrorist group The Ten Rings, which appears in ‘Iron Man’ and the deleted scenes of ‘Iron Man 2’.

In an interview with Voices From Krypton, Pearce goes into the motivation behind creating this short and leaves those who were disappointed by the lack of the comic book version of the Mandarin in the film with the notion of “Never say never” despite being unapologetic for the swerve that some disliked:

“It’s weird. The idea for the short was there before any of the kind of storm in a teacup following our Mandarin reveal. What’s actually interesting as well is that the evidence of the ‘real’ Mandarin is laid out in all of the Iron Man movies, as well as all the stuff we said around the release of the movie. The Ten Rings are part of ‘Iron Man 1’, they make an appearance in deleted scenes in ‘Iron Man 2’, and we’re very specific about the fact that he’s a real guy that exists in the world.

In fact, we talked about it a lot when the movie came out. There was always the sense that this term had been co-opted by Killian’s think tank. Obviously the events in the short made that even more explicit. The weird thing is I don’t have any regrets with what we did with Iron Man and I feel no reason to apologize for it. The short kind of let me join some dots that were already there. But it wasn’t the reason we did it. The reason we did it is that we wanted to play with Trevor Slattery some more…

Oh, yes, totally, but I would hate for anyone to think I was apologizing for a twist that I’m deeply proud of. I feel like it would have been dishonest to ‘Iron Man 3’ if we’d made Trevor the real Mandarin after all and it was a double bluff. I think where the short leads to is a more exciting place and hopefully not one that betrays the intention of ‘Iron Man 3’.”

What do you think of Drew Pearce’s explanation of ‘All Hail The King’? Were you happy with how the Marvel One-Shot turned out? Do you think that we’ll eventually get to see the “real” Mandarin or Trevor Slattery again? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.