We’re less than five months away from the release of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and we still haven’t seen an official image never mind a shred of footage. The martial arts comic book blockbuster has suffered several times at the hands of the Coronavirus pandemic, with the current September 3rd debut being the fifth different release date it’s been handed.
Shang-Chi arrives just eight weeks after Black Widow, so it stands to reason that there’s going to be a full-length trailer attached to Natasha Romanoff’s long-awaited solo debut. Then again, Marvel Studios might not want to leave it so late in the day to kick the marketing campaign into high gear, meaning we could realistically be getting our first look at Simu Liu’s title character sooner rather than later.
In any case, plot specifics are being kept under wraps for the time being, but we do know that Shang-Chi will be forced to confront his own past after being drawn into the orbit of the Ten Rings, and we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us War Machine would be getting his own Disney Plus show long before Armor Wars was announced – that there’ll be an interesting twist in the film.
According to our intel, Tony Leung’s criminal mastermind the Mandarin will be revealed as Shang-Chi’s father, and there’ve been previous reports circulating that say the hero could be positioned as the villain’s adoptive son, so it can’t be completely ruled out. Of course, some Marvel fans rebelled the last time significant changes were made to the Mandarin’s backstory, but it’s unlikely that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings would face a similar sort of pushback.
