Iron Man 3

After the Battle of New York, Tony Stark is no longer the untouchable showman he used to be. He can't sleep, he has panic attacks, and he spends his nights in the workshop building suit after suit, which puts a strain on his relationship with Pepper Potts, who now runs Stark Industries. Meanwhile a terrorist called the Mandarin is carrying out a string of bombings that no one can explain and taunting America through hijacked television broadcasts.

When the violence hits close to home, Tony dares his enemy in public and pays for it. His Malibu mansion is destroyed, his suit is broken, and he wakes up stranded in snowy rural Tennessee with no lab and no support. With only his wits and the help of an unlikely young ally, he has to work out what links the bombings to a secret, unstable technology called Extremis, which scientist Maya Hansen and the ambitious think-tank founder Aldrich Killian both have a stake in.

Shane Black directs the film like a wisecracking buddy thriller set at Christmas. It has as much dialogue and character comedy as it has spectacle, and it asks what Tony Stark is actually worth once you take away his toys.

Shane Black takes the superhero apart to find the man inside. The film is openly about trauma and PTSD. Tony carried a nuke through a wormhole, and now he hides in endless armor instead of facing his fear. Black and co-writer Drew Pearce said they wanted to explore "false faces" and Tony's dual identity: he defines himself through the mask of Iron Man. The Mandarin, a terrorist who turns out to be a performance, mirrors that idea. Both men hide behind a constructed image.

The message is that identity is not equipment. When Tony finally says he is Iron Man with no suit on at all, the film argues that heroism comes from ingenuity, responsibility and the courage to face your own demons, not from the metal. The film also warns that fear can be manufactured and sold, both to the public and to the self.

Satire or betrayal? One reading sees the fake Mandarin as a sharp comment on how governments and corporations stage enemies to sell fear and weapons, and on how a media image can replace reality. Another reading treats it as a bait-and-switch that wastes the comics' iconic villain.

Iron Man 3 was the first film after The Avengers and opened Marvel's Phase Two. It took the MCU's first major event and dealt with its psychological fallout. Critics have called its portrayal of PTSD "a huge leap forward for superhero movies," because it offers an alternative to the invulnerable tough-guy hero.

Its box office of more than $1.215 billion made it the second-biggest film of 2013. It broke opening-day records in China, where an extended cut was released. The Mandarin twist became one of the most argued-about decisions in franchise history. It was praised as a subversive satire of manufactured terror and attacked by fans as a betrayal of Iron Man's greatest comic villain. Marvel kept returning to it: the One-Shot All Hail the King revisited Trevor Slattery, and later projects such as Wonder Man have been described as "fixing" the twist. Retrospective writers increasingly call the film the MCU's "boldest character study."

The film is Certified Fresh at 79% on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 78% audience score, and audiences gave it an "A" CinemaScore. Viewers praised Downey's vulnerable, funny performance, Shane Black's witty dialogue and buddy-comedy energy, the bond between Tony and the kid Harley in the Tennessee section, and the unusually honest treatment of anxiety.

Criticism centers on the Mandarin twist. It split fans into those who loved it and those who called it "sacrilegious." Others criticized the Extremis mechanics, the crowded suit-heavy climax and the neat ending in which Tony simply gives up the suits. Overall, it remains one of the MCU's most divisive entries, but it made a lot of money and its reputation has improved as a character-driven outlier.