her. Stark escapes and reunites with Rhodes, discovering that Killian intends to attack President Ellis aboard Air Force One, using the Iron Patriot armor, controlled by Savin. Stark kills Savin, saving the passengers and crew, but cannot stop Killian from abducting Ellis. At an impounded damaged oil tanker, Killian intends to kill Ellis on live television. The Vice President would then become a puppet leader, following Killian's orders, in exchange for Extremis to cure his young daughter's disability. Stark and Rhodes infiltrate the platform, aided by the remaining Iron Man suits, controlled remotely by J.A.R.V.I.S.. Rhodes secures the President and takes him to safety, while Stark discovers Potts has survived the Extremis procedure. Before he can save her, a rig collapses around them, and she falls to the platform below, causing Stark to believe her dead. Stark fights Killian but finds himself cornered. Killian, who appropriated Hansen's Extremis research as a cure for his own disability and expanded the program to include injured war veterans, reveals he is the real Mandarin behind Slattery's cover. Potts, whose Extremis powers allowed her to survive the fall, kills Killian to save Stark. As a gesture of his devotion to Potts, Stark orders J.A.R.V.I.S. to destroy all the Iron Man suits. The Vice President and Slattery are arrested, and Happy awakens from his coma. With Stark's help, Potts's Extremis effects are stabilized; and Stark promises to scale back his life as Iron Man, undergoing surgery to remove the shrapnel near his heart and throwing his obsolete chest arc reactor into the sea. He muses that, even without the technology, he will always be Iron Man. Cast Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark / Iron Man: An Avenger and a self-described genius, billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist with mechanical suits of armor of his own invention. Stark now struggles to come to terms with his near-death experience in The Avengers, suffering from anxiety attacks. On making a third Iron Man film, Downey said, "My sense of it is that we need to leave it all on the field—whatever that means in the end. You can pick several different points of departure for that." On following up The Avengers, Downey said they "tried to be practical, in a post-Avengers world. What are his challenges now? What are some limitations that might be placed on him? And what sort of threat would have him, as usual, ignore those