Everything we’ve heard about the China-only scenes in Iron Man 3 is that they’re sort of lackluster and don’t really add anything to the plot. But hey, if they exist Marvel movie completionists might as well watch them, right? Now those of us who don’t live in China will have that chance, as Marvel is reportedly releasing three minutes of that extra footage as a short film.
The short, called The Prologue, will star Dr. Wu (Wang Xueqi), who was in the non-China version for all of ten seconds. He meets Tony Stark at a party near the beginning of the film, talks to JARVIS on the phone at another point, and serves as Tony Stark’s surgeon near the end. As its name would indicate the short will take place before Iron Man 3, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if most of Wu’s screen time is during the middle and end of the film, but I’m just going to trust Marvel on this one.
I knew when watching the movie that he was the character whose role was expanded in the Chinese version, but I didn’t get the relevance of his character until talking to a comics-reading friend after the movie. Even though he’s based on Chen Lu, a.k.a. Radioactive Man, and is therefore quite important in the Marvelverse, his Iron Man 3 scenes apparently didn’t really do him justice; many Chinese bloggers have criticized the much-hyped inclusion of Xueqi and Fan Bingbing, calling their scenes (or, well, Bingbing apparently only had one scene) superfluous.
Superfluous or not, we’ll get a chance to see them, though we don’t know when or how (online release? Blu-ray extra?). If the former, we’ll post it. If the latter… well, we’ll have to see how quickly the YouTube versions get yanked. But we’ll try our best to share the extra three minutes of Iron Man-y goodness with you.
(via: SuperHeroHype)
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