Iron Man 3Save

We open with a Tony Stark voiceover narration set against AC/DC's 'Back in Black.' Tony, narrating from after the events of The Avengers (2012), tells us about a Christmas Eve incident in Switzerland circa 1999. Tony — drunk, before he was Iron Man, before he was anyone — humiliated a desperate genetic engineer named Aldrich Killian by refusing to meet with him on the rooftop. Killian, decades later, will become the film's true villain.

Cut to: Tony six months after Loki's invasion of New York. He cannot sleep. He has been building Iron Man suits compulsively — over 40 prototypes by film's start. He has anxiety attacks at the mention of New York. The Battle of New York broke him psychologically. He has post-traumatic stress disorder, a clinical case the film treats with rare gravity for a 2013 blockbuster. Pepper Potts is now running Stark Industries; Tony is, mostly, hiding.

Meanwhile, a series of bombings across the U.S. are being claimed by a terrorist calling himself the Mandarin — a robed figure with a long beard and a deep voice broadcasting threats across global television. Tony's friend Happy Hogan is critically injured in one of the bombings. Tony, in a fit of rage, threatens the Mandarin publicly: 'You don't get to talk to me. You son of a bitch.' He gives the press his home address.

That night, three Mandarin-controlled aerial assault helicopters destroy Tony's Malibu mansion. The cliffside collapses. Tony's suits are buried. Pepper escapes. Tony, in a damaged Mark XLII armor, is forced to fly across the country to Tennessee — the only state where the suit's autopilot will reach before the battery dies. He crashes in rural Tennessee, alone, suitless, and 1,500 miles from the next-nearest Iron Man suit. The film's middle act unfolds with Tony, in civilian clothes, befriending a 10-year-old kid named Harley Keener (Ty Simpkins) in a garage workshop.

Through Harley's tech investigation, Tony pieces together the Extremis project — Killian's bioengineering experiment that gives subjects healing powers and temperature manipulation, but at the cost of unstable thermal combustion. Most subjects explode. The Mandarin's bombings, Tony realizes, are not bombs at all — they are Extremis-failure events. The 'Mandarin' broadcasts are a fabrication. Tony arrives at the actual Mandarin's compound in Miami.

Tony and Rhodey (now wearing the Iron Patriot armor, a paint-job redesign of War Machine) infiltrate Killian's headquarters. The U.S. President — kidnapped by Killian to be publicly executed on live television in an Extremis-explosion — is rescued by Iron Patriot mid-air. The climax is at a Norco oil-platform tanker in the Pacific. Killian, fully Extremis-enhanced, fights Tony. The fight involves a remote-controlled Iron Legion — Tony's 40+ suit prototypes, flown into the area by JARVIS and operated by Tony's voice commands. The Iron Legion is destroyed during the fight.

Pepper, who has been kidnapped and dosed with Extremis by Killian, kills him in the climax — leaping into the fight and finishing him with a single repulsor blast. Pepper has briefly become superhuman from the Extremis. Tony, after the battle, performs a surgical operation to remove the shrapnel from his chest — the same shrapnel his arc reactor has been suppressing since the first Iron Man film. He no longer needs the reactor. He throws it into the ocean. The film closes on Tony detonating his remaining suits at sea — 'Clean Slate Protocol' — as a gesture of starting over with Pepper. The film's final voiceover: 'I am Iron Man.'

Iron Man 3 grossed $1.215 billion globally — the highest-grossing solo Iron Man film at release and the second-highest-grossing 2013 film worldwide. Critics responded warmly to the character-driven approach (Tony out of the armor for most of the film, dealing with PTSD); the Mandarin twist remained the franchise's most-controversial single decision until Shang-Chi (2021) addressed it. Shane Black has not directed another Marvel film since.