operation, with the Mandarin and Killian emerging as antagonists in later versions of the script. During one of the writing sessions, Pearce suggested that the Mandarin was a fake, and Black agreed by going with making him an actor, which in turn Pearce detailed as an overacting British stage performer. Black explained: "Who would be fool enough to declare that he is an international terrorist? If you're smart, whatever regime you're part of, you'd put a puppet committee and remain your house." In turn Killian would hide Trevor Slattery in "his own frat house, in kind of a drug-related house arrest" to keep the secret alive. According to Black, the reveal of the actual villain being Hansen was "like Remington Steele, you think it's the man but at the end, the woman has been running the whole show." The role was eventually shifted to Killian because of objections by Marvel Entertainment executives, who were concerned with apparent merchandising losses that could come with having a female villain. The roles of several other major female characters were also made smaller in the final film compared to earlier drafts. Both the opening and the ending of the film were reworked in various ways. First it would begin with a flashback to Tony's childhood. Then like Iron Man it would begin in medias res, with Tony crashing in Tennessee before a voice-over that would lead to how he got there, until it got changed to the final version. For the climactic tanker battle, it was originally considered that Brandt would show up in the James Bond tradition of the henchman coming back for the heroes. Instead they chose to use Killian himself, and have Pepper, whom he abused earlier, cause his downfall as a way of poetic justice. The final dialogue was originally written as "I am Tony Stark" to be a response to the first film's ending, but eventually it changed to "I am Iron Man" to enhance the mythical qualities. On setting the film around Christmas, Black said "I think it's a sense of if you're doing something on an interesting scale that involves an entire universe of characters, one way to unite them is to have them all undergo a common experience. There's something at Christmas that unites everybody and it already sets a stage within the stage, that wherever you are, you're experiencing this world together. I think that