Now that we’re less than a month away from The Avengers, we’re starting to see a lot more movement on the Marvel projects that will come after the massive superhero team-up. Last week Marvel officially set a release date for Captain America 2 (April 4th, 2014) even as they continued to search for a director, and now this week we’ve got some casting news for the movie that will directly follow The Avengers: Iron Man 3. According to Variety, Ben Kingsley has entered into final talks to play the main villain of the film, although it’s not entirely clear what his role will be. We do, however, know who he won’t be playing. Marvel has specifically stated that he won’t be starring as fan favourite The Mandarin, a character that potentially could have been a good fit for Kingsley.

It is believed that Kingsley will play a villain inspired by the Iron Man: Extremis comic book series, a six-part storyline by Warren Ellis that the original Iron Man film was partially based on. He will supposedly be “involved in the spread of a virus through nanobots”, although no other details have been made available at this time. In Extremis, the villain was a guy named Mallen, who took the experimental Extremis drug and became a superpowered terrorist.

THR hints that Kingsley won’t actually be the primary villain, and also that The Mandarin may still be involved, since they could likely rework his powers to come from nanotechnology as opposed to alien rings. Jon Favreau had previously stated that he wanted The Mandarin featured in Iron Man 3, but since he is no longer directing that could mean nothing. Iron Man 3 hits theatres on May 3rd, 2013, and will be directed by Shane Black and co-written by Drew Pearce (No Heroics). What do you think of this news? Would you like to see The Mandarin as the main villain in Iron Man 3?