While promoting his new film The Nice Guys, Shane Black has shared some new information about making Iron Man 3 including a revelation that the film was originally intended to have a female villain. According to Slashfilm the director says that the gender of the villain was changed because Marvel was concerned that a female character would result in weaker toy sales.
“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 we’ve changed our minds because, after consulting, we’ve decided that toy won’t sell as well if it’s a female,” Black said. He does note that the decision was not made by Kevin Feige but by Marvel corporate. In fact, Feige had publically had many disagreements with Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter, leading to a new arrangement that found the Marvel Studio genius reporting directly to Alan Horn at Walt Disney Studios. However, this change transpired well after the release of Iron Man 3.
Slashfilm notes the irony is all of this is that action figures for the Aldrich Killian character in question (played by Guy Pearce) are few and far between. Still it points to another case where female Marvel characters such as Black Widow, Gamora, and Scarlet Witch are underrepresented when it comes to consumer products.