Loki, Ronin, Red Skull, Yellowjacket, Whiplash, The Winter Solider, Malekith, Ultron and the almighty Thanos. All Marvel Cinematic Universe villains. All with male genitalia.
However, this almost wasn’t the case! In a recent interview on the press junket for his latest film “The Nice Guys”, director Shane Black brought to light some of the changes made during pre production on “Iron Man 3”.
"We replaced a lot of things. The plot went this way and that way. Stéphanie Szostak’s character was bigger at one point and we reduced it. Rebecca Hall’s character was bigger at one point and we reduced it,” Black states in an interview with Uproxx.
For those of you that don’t remember, Rebecca Hall played Maya Hensen, a scientist and old “friend” of Tony Stark’s that ends up betraying him to the ultimate villain in the film, Aldrich Killian. Killian disposes of Hensen in a rather hurried fashion when she proves to be of no use. But now it seems Black’s original plan was to have Hall’s character be the one pulling the strings! Black goes onto say, "in the earlier draft, the woman was essentially Killian [the role Guy Pearce played] – and they didn’t want a female Killian, they wanted a male Killian. I liked the idea, like 'Remington Steele,' you think it’s the man but at the end, the woman has been running the whole show. They just said, 'no way.'"
The reason being? Marvel didn’t think a female villain could sell toys.
Black continues, "There was an early draft of 'Iron Man 3' where we had an inkling of a problem. Which is that we had a female character who was the villain in the draft. We had finished the script and we were given a no-holds-barred memo saying that cannot stand and we’ve changed our minds because, after consulting, we’ve decided that toys won’t sell as well if it’s a female…We had to change the entire script because of toy making."
Marvel has painted themselves rather poorly in this light before, as many were quick to point out that almost none of the toys for “Age of Ultron” included Black Widow.
It seems that things may be improving, however, as Marvel Studios recently separated from Marvel Entertainment, and that Marvel Studios’ head Kevin Feige was apparently not the one to make that decision. "If you ever say anything about decisions made at Marvel, I hope you’ll qualify it by saying that Kevin Feige is the guy who gets it right. And I don’t know if it was Ike [head of Marvel Entertainment, who Feige formerly reporter to], I don’t know who it was. They never told me who made the decision, we just got that memo one day and it was about toy sales. That’s all I know,” Black finishes.
We all know that this was of course the right move, because of the mass amounts of Guy Pearce dolls that Disney and Marvel sold that year.
