OK, so I saw it. That was Hella Fun.

And my take on one of the outstanding questions is that Pepper is stabilized, not depowered. It's (a) more interesting from a narrative perspective; (b) puts her on a more equal footing with Tony; and (c) means she's way less at risk in the future, since she's basically invulnerable.

And I loved the Mandarin reveal. That was some good trolling. Well played, indeed.

I do agree with someone's question upthread, which is that not ALL the Extremis soldiers should have been onboard with killing the President & Iron Man and all. They didn't join the program for unsavory reasons, after all. Also, the data that Tony found was on the NSA servers: that program was closely coordinated with the federal government. It's hard to believe nobody other than Tony ever saw the connection between Davis & Extremis.

Why would we think that all of Extremis was on board? In fact, since he's created Mandarin to cover his oopsies, we know that most of the problem (the first guy and the Mann's Chinese guy at the very least) were not shown to be on anti-government. For all we know, there are a bunch more Peppers, and the only people that get let out to fight for him were the loyal ones, the ones he bribed with walking/playing ping pong again. All we were shown is that a number larger than zero but smaller than than the total fit that profile.

Hmm, good point, ita. We don't know how many Extremis people there were. But that's a lot a lot of test subjects, if the fighters Tony & Rhodey were dealing with were only some of them. And I don't see how the NSA didn't know that there was this fairly significant flaw in the program (where they blow up!), if AIM was getting their subjects from the government.

Plot hole, anyway.

Based on the military hardware used to knock Tony's home into the Malibu surf, I'm guessing that the VP was pulling a lot of strings on Killian's behalf. Maybe he was pink-slipping or otherwise dealing with intelligence directors who put the pieces of the puzzle together?

I'm always amused by opening weekends like this:

1. Iron Man 3 $175M
2. Pain & Gain $7.6M

For those interested, this article handily summarizes the Chinese content.

From the sound of it, the Chinese version of Iron Man 3 brings four minutes of film nobody really wants or needs, save the film's producers so they could presumably secure whatever funding was necessary. Shame that they weren't smarter about the deal.

"It literally offends me as an American in China and as an ethnically Chinese person that Hollywood would attempt to sell this to the Chinese audience," says Jou. "It undermines Chinese people's intelligence and movie savvy." But it makes money, no?

Hey Americanistas, when you reach May 8 check out Google's header. They've done an animated tribute to Saul Bass. It's quite excellent.

How is the future, man? Are there jetpacks? Is Justin Bieber still a thing?

Yeah, I saw Warren Ellis' name on a line with a bunch of other comic writers that did significant Iron Man stuff, like Bob Layton and David Micheline.

Ah, imdb is listing Mike Massa as lead stunt double on IM3. The credit may have been on its own line somewhere rather than the big stunt section I was looking through in the theater.