Marvel dropped a new trailer for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings earlier this week, and it reveals some interesting things about what we can expect from the studio’s next big superhero movie. If you pay close attention to the final moments of the trailer, you’ll see two characters who look awfully familiar.
We haven’t seen one of these characters in a long time. And that would be Tim Roth’s Emil Blonsky/Abomination from 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, who is seemingly facing off with Wong, Benedict Wong’s character from Doctor Strange in some kind of a cage match.
When the trailer dropped, fans immediately began discussing whether these two characters were actually who we thought they were. This time around, what you see is what you get, according to Marvel boss Kevin 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,” he told Rotten Tomatoes.
Shang-Chi trailer takes us back to MCU Phase 1
As a refresher, Wong was last seen in Avengers: Endgame; he helps Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) keep New York’s Sanctum Sanctorum protected. While we’ve still seen him pretty recently, we haven’t seen Abnomination since Edward Norton played the Hulk way back when.
“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,” Feige said. And the Abomination has a new design to mark his return. I’m here for it, ya’ll!
And while we’re on the topic of Abomination/Blonsky, we’d be remiss not to mention that Roth will apparently be reprising his role for the upcoming She-Hulk series for Disney+, which is currently in production.
Continuing with the Phase 1 connections, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has a strong link to the first Iron Man movie, which was also released in 2008. An organization known as the Ten Rings, run by Mandarin (Tony Leung), held Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) captive back then. They’re basically the reason Stark was forced to become Iron Man in the first place, so we have a lot to thank them for, as evil as they may be.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings fight its way into theaters on September 3!
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h/t SYFY Wire