Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings ended its most recent trailer with a very exciting couple of character cameos: Abomination and Wong. Abomination has not been heard from in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for more than a decade with is first and last appearance coming in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. Wong has been Doctor Strange’s right hand wizard, appearing in Doctor Strange, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. Now, Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige has confirmed the Shang-Chi featured these two Marvel characters duking it out in a fighting ring and opened up about why it has him particularly excited.
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“Some fans said, ‘This looks like a character they hadn’t seen in many years named The Abomination, fighting a character that looks like Wong,” Feige told RottenTomatoes. “And I can say that the reason it looks like that is because that is Abomination fighting Wong.”
In fact, the Marvel Cinematic Universe ties will run much deeper than bringing back a villain from the first Hulk movie. “That’s what’s fun about the MCU at this stage,” Feige said. “We can do something like Shang-Chi, introducing a brand new hero into the MCU and into the world at large. But that subtitle, The Legend of the Ten Rings, actually connects it back to the very beginning of the MCU, the Ten Rings being the organization that kidnapped Tony Stark at the very beginning of Iron Man one. And that organization was inspired by a character called the Mandarin in the comics.” See a full breakdown of the trailer in the video below.
Finally, Shang-Chi is going to bring the real Ten Rings and a truer Mandarin villain to the MCU. “And going back to Iron Man one: We’ve been talking about that when we do bring this character to the screen, [we] only wanted to do it when we felt we could do it supreme justice and really showcase the complexity of this character, which frankly we couldn’t do in an Iron Man movie because an Iron Man movie is about Iron Man; an Iron Man movie is about Tony Stark. So [Iron Man 3 director] Shane Black, in his film and his script that he co-wrote, came up with this fun twist that we love to this day, and it turned out to be Trevor Slattery. Just because that version wasn’t real didn’t mean there’s not a leader of the Ten Rings organization, and that is who we meet for the first time in Shang-Chi.”
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