Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark Makes A Cameo In ‘Shang-Chi’ Trailer
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings which opens this week (September 3), as a surprise cameo of sorts by one of the most beloved Avengers, as revealed in a recently released trailer.
Although Robert Downey Jr. has made it clear that his time in the MCU is over — he went so far as to unfollow all of his Marvel costars on social media — Kevin Feige’s Marvel Studios isn’t done with Tony Stark just yet.
At approximately the 0:36 mark of the trailer, fans see Wenwu (Shang-Chi’s father) sitting in front of numerous screens playing what appears to be security camera footage. He says, “I always know where my children are.”
You can watch the Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings trailer below:
The film, which stars Simu Liu, is set to introduce the real Mandarin, Wenwu (Tony Leung), into the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time. If the name “the Mandarin” sounds familiar to you, Sir Ben Kingsley played a fraudulent version of him in Iron Man 3.
We first learned of the Ten Rings organization in the very first Marvel Cinematic Universe film, Iron Man (2008). Then, the elusive group actually made a second appearance in Iron Man 3, when the Mandarin is mentioned.
Though the Shang-Chi trailer features the incident where Tony Stark was kidnapped in Afghanistan by the Ten Rings, it doesn’t pan down far enough in the trailer to see RDJ, but it is the exact same archive footage from Iron Man:
https://youtu.be/r3GQbPPMj3s?t=185
The Ten Rings resurfaced in 2013’s Iron Man 3 (2013) when Kingsley’s The Mandarin was revealed to be a patsy for Killian Aldrich (Guy Pearce). The Mandarin turned out to be washed-up actor Trevor Slattery, who was bribed with drugs and money to play the part. Kingsley returned briefly for Marvel’s 2014 short film All Hail the King, where he reprised his role as Slattery.
The 14-minute short, written and directed by Drew Pearce, finds Trevor in Seagate Prison, where he has become somewhat of a celebrity. Documentary filmmaker Jackson Norriss (Scoot McNairy) has Trevor recount his childhood and early acting career, including a failed CBS pilot. It turns out that the real Mandarin is angered by Trevor’s portrayal and wants to meet him face to face.
The short film was initially made as an extra for the Blu-ray of Thor: The Dark World, but now has been made available to watch on Disney+ now that the Ten Rings are taking center stage.
