Kevin Feige confirms that’s Abomination fighting Wong in the Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings trailer

You’ll recall that when the trailer dropped for the MCU’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings there was a lot of excitement as it seemed that Emil Blonsky aka Abomination was back in a cage fight at the end.

And we speculated that, yes, that’s who it was (and we pondered if actor Tim Roth will be back here) and now it’s been confirmed… and so has the rumor of who Abomination was fighting.

Speaking to RT Marvel head noncho Kevin Feige confirmed that not only is Abomination back but so is Wong, played by Benedict Wong, who is best known from the Doctor Strange movie.

“We just recently released the final trailer for Shang-Chi,” said Feige.

“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. And I can say that the reason it looks like that is because that is Abomination fighting Wong.”

Feige explains that the ability to deep dive into a movie that come out over a decade ago is one of the joins of working on such a connected universe: “[It’s] a fun thing to have a character that we haven’t had on screen in over a decade show up again in the MCU. And to see fans on that little tag of the trailer recognize that and embrace that is great fun.”

However, while the character of Shang-Chi is relatively unknown, at least with movie fans, the Ten Rings in the title is a connection to the very first MCU movie and it’s in the title for a reason: “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 organisation that kidnapped Tony Stark at the very beginning of Iron Man one. And that organisation was inspired by a character called the Mandarin in the comics.”

The Mandarin, of course, appeared in Iron Man 3 before we learned that he was actually just a failed actor pretending to be a warlord. The actor, Trevor Slattery, played to perfection by Ben Kingsley, was later abducted from prison and taken to meet the REAL Mandarin, played in Shang-Chi by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, in the Marvel One-Shot All Hail the King… which has us wondering if we’ll see Trevor again?

“And going back to Iron Man one,” Feige continues, “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 organisation, and that is who we meet for the first time in Shang-Chi.”

So, it looks like, while Shang-Chi is a new corner of the MCU, it will be bringing some serious connectivity with it… now, will we get Iron Fist in a cage fight? We can only hope.

Thoughts on all this? I want to hear them, gang.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is in cinemas September 3rd, 2021. She-Hulk is expected to be released on Disney+ in 2022.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes