Shang-Chi Director Teases How This Ten Rings Connects to Iron Man

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will finally reveal the truth about the Mandarin, the head of the shadowy Ten Rings organization. The group is as old as the MCU itself, first appearing in the original Iron Man. Iron Man 3 mentions the Mandarin, though the villain in the film turns out to be a fraud. Later, it was implied that a true Mandarin does exist, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will attribute that title to Wenwu, Shang-Chi’s father. Speaking to Fandango, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton explained the film’s connection to Iron Man.

“I mean, that’s going to be the fun of watching this movie — understanding who the Ten Rings are finally and seeing how they are,” Cretton says. “I don’t want to say too much before people watch it, but it was really fun to dig into the Ten Rings and answer a lot of questions that were posed early on, before we were ever even imagining we’d be a part of telling the MCU story. But it has been very satisfying to paint a full picture of who the Ten Rings are — and specifically who they are to the father of Shang-Chi, our Wenwu character. And I think you’ll find in this movie that the Ten Rings — there’s a lot of meaning behind the Ten Rings, both the physical Ten Rings and the organization of the Ten Rings and how they affect our two leads. That is a huge part of this movie.”

Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige previously promised Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings would do justice to the Mandarin character. “Well that’s what’s fun about the MCU at this stage is that we can do something like Shang-Chi, introducing a brand new hero into the MCU and into the world at large, but that subtitle ‘And 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,” Feige told Rotten Tomatoes. “That organization was inspired by a character called The Mandarin in the comics and going back to Iron Man 1 we’ve been talking about ‘When do we bring this character to the screen?’ and 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, it’s about Tony Stark.”

What do you think? Let us know in the comments. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings opens in theaters on September 3rd.