New Interview Reveals That Marvel Gender Swapped Iron Man 3 Villain From Female to Male, to Sell More Toys

During a new interview with Uproxx, Iron Man 3 writer Shane Black disclosed some pretty tender details regarding Marvel's strategic decision to genderswap the villain from female to male. Here's the chat from Uproxx, transcribed:

Why? Rebecca Hall’s character does have an abrupt ending.

All I’ll say is this, on the record: 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 [Marvel’s] changed our minds because, after consulting, we’ve decided that toy won’t sell as well if it’s a female.

What?

So, we had to change the entire script because of toy making. Now, that’s not Feige. That’s Marvel corporate, but now you don’t have that problem anymore.

Ike Perlmutter is gone.

Yeah, Ike’s gone. But New York called and said, “That’s money out of our bank.” In the earlier draft, the woman was essentially Killian — 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."