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He has no idea where Tony Stark will have ended up, post-Avengers in 2012, but Jon Favreau has confirmed that he wants to continue Iron Man's solo outings when the team-up dust has settled.

He told MTV that he sees The Mandarin as Robert Downey Jr's next major adversary.

"You've got to do The Mandarin", says the director, who has been teasing this in the films already with tiny references to the Ten Ring organisation, "but the problem is, the way he's depicted in the comic books... you don't want to see that."

The way he's depicted in the comic books is basically as a dastardly Chinaman, a la Fu Manchu. He's a scientific genius, descended from Genghis Khan, whose martial arts prowess makes him capable of taking on the armoured Stark with his bare hands (although at one point he lost his memory and became a cleaner at Stark Enterprises).

An IGN poll last year ranked him the 81st greatest comic book villain of all time. So he's above Carnage and Mysterio, but 79 paces below The Joker.

He gets his power from ten magical rings, which Favreau concedes is a problem in his highly tech-based Iron Man universe. But with that universe expanding to include the supernatural Thor, he reasons "maybe introducing magic won't seem out of place" after all.

Iron Man 2 is currently dominating the world's box office. Iron Man 3... is a long way off.