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Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 has always proven to be a fairly polarizing installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially when it comes to the incredibly divisive Mandarin twist, one that was eventually retconned in One-Shot All Hail the King, and then cemented by Trevor Slattery’s return in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
It’s since become an unwanted footnote in MCU folklore that Black wrote the script with Rebecca Hall’s Maya Hansen initially set to be revealed as the big bad all along, before he was forced to drop the idea when the infamous Creative Committee said that a female antagonist wouldn’t sell as many toys.
As a result, Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian was given a much greater presence in the final draft of the screenplay, and went on to establish himself as one of the franchise’s weakest-ever villains. That’s no fault of the actor’s, when he does a decent enough job of charting the A.I.M. head’s evolution from Stark fanboy to arch-nemesis, but he has admitted in an interview with ComicBook that he’d be open to a return.
“I’d be very much interested in to see him come back. And I think because of the nature of the character that he is, it’s totally conceivable that he could come back. So yes, I would love to see what he is up to, as well. Because he’s somebody – obviously as we saw in Iron Man 3 – went through a sort of rapid vast change from the beginning of the story. So who knows where he’s ended up.”
Are MCU fans clamoring for the return of Killian, though? Probably not, but nothing can be definitively ruled out when the multiverse continues to stamp its authority on the mythology.