Note: this article discusses spoilers for Iron Man 3.

Much has been spoken of the recently-ended “civil war” between Marvel Studios and Marvel Entertainment.

Up until recently - Marvel Studios (the movie wing, lead by Kevin Feige) had to report to Marvel Entertainment (the comic company, lead by Issac Perlmutter).  This led to internal conflict - which had been recently removed, as Feige now reports directly to the heads at Disney.

There’s been much online about some of the changes over the years demanded by Perlmutter (he was not into female hero movies, for example), but for the first time that I’m aware of, one of Marvel’s filmmakers pointed directly to an issue where the Marvel Entertainment heads caused issues for Marvel Studios.

Remember Rebecca Hall’s awesome character in Iron Man 3? She was pretty rad, right? Then just sort of died. That wasn’t always the plan.

According to a new interview with writer/director Shane Black (promoting The Nice Guys), Black originally had bigger plans for Hall’s character - where she would be the real villain, as opposed to Guy Pierce’s Aldrich Killian.

Why did this happen? Concerns above Feige about toy sales. Yep. Toys.

I still hold that the end result was a pretty damn solid movie, but looking back at the plot for Iron Man 3, it would’ve been such a noir-esq move for the down-on-his-luck Stark to face near death due to a scorned woman (Rebecca Hall’s Maya Hansen), then fall face first into being saved by his one true love, “his girl Friday”, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Sure, we got a version of that, but this alternate read is pure Shane Black. Alas.