Just as important as the superheroes in Marvel are the villains of the franchise. These characters can save or ruin a movie and, on many occasions, they tend to have the most legendary scenes. In these 16 years of the Cinematographic Universe we have seen a lot of diversity on the good side, but its enemies have remained much flatter.
Let's talk about the villainous women, for example, who have been slow to arrive. It had to be Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2and Hela (Cate Blanchett), from Thor: Ragnarokthose that broke the monotony, but this difference could be made much earlier. Previously, Elizabeth Olsen had been Scarlet Witch in Avengers: Age of Ultronbut do we consider it at the same level of villainy?
The fact is that, before all of them, Marvel had planned to introduce its first villain. Scientist Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) would be the most evil of Iron Man 3. However, Marvel's higher-ups at the time banished the idea for a baffling reason.
Originally, the screenwriter and director of Iron Man 3Shane Black , and his co-writer, Drew Pearce, had planned that the final installment of the trilogy starring Robert Downey Jr. would hold a final surprise. This is what they revealed in an interview with UpRoxx in 2016.
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“As in Remington Steele“You think it's the man, but in the end, the woman has been running the whole show.”Black revealed. Here, the man would have been Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), later revealing that the great antagonist had been Maya all along. The problem came with the studio's top executives, who saw it as a mistake economically speaking.
They gave us a no-holds-barred message that a female villain couldn't exist. 'We have changed our mind because, after consultation, we have decided that the toys are not going to sell as well if it is a woman
'Ok, then we'll get it out of the way and that's it', the team must have thought. The executives' change of heart led the writers to introduce Maya's death. In the film, Killian is the one behind Extremis, for which he used Maya's pioneering research. She is the one who tries to stop him, but the villain shoots her in the stomach and puts an end to her participation in the film.
“It was quite shocking”
Rebecca Hall's role in the film has never stood out too much and it was the actress herself who said in 2016, in an interview with The Wrap, what The first script he received was much better. than the one that ended up on screen: “I signed for a role to play until the end of the film, and that had an important weight in the end, a significant role. But in the middle of filming everything changed. It was quite shocking.” Years later, with Entertainment Weeklyadded that she had tried to fight for the first script, but gave up.
I fought with them for a while and then I said, 'Well, you have to give me a decent death scene and one more scene with Iron Man.
Hall admits that it hurt him, but that he hopes that what happened will help things change a little in the industry. “It was heartbreaking, but that was a few years ago. Now they have to be able to sell female action figures if they give women lead roles. I hope everything works out for the better“he reflected.
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