Shang-Chi Toys Reveal the MCU’s Ten Rings
It’s always fun to see things about a movie that are kept secret until the early release of toys reveal it to the world. While nothing is as Earth-shattering as when Hasbro released a The Force Awakens Rey figure with a lightsaber a week before the movie arrived in theaters (and then Lucasfilm worked overtime to scrub fan photos of it from the Internet), the recent release of Marvel’s Shang-Chi toys has revealed one small change to the lore from the comics in the transition to the MCU.
In the comics, the Ten Rings were actually rings that The Mandarin wore in each finger. That appears to be slightly different in the MCU.
Earlier in the week I found the Marvel Legends Shang-Chi figures on store shelves, and noticed that the Wenwu (The Mandarin in the movie) figure had five metal bands on each wrist; ten rings. I commented to a friend at the time that those could be the MCU’s Ten Rings as opposed to actual rings on his fingers. Now it looks like that could be the case.
Simu Liu Tweeted a photo of the entire toy line, and there are two role-play toys of the metal bands that The Mandarin wears, and the arm band toys are called “Legend of the Ten Rings”:
I am a child pic.twitter.com/YpGFJINZqY
— Simu Liu (@SimuLiu) April 30, 2021
Based on the toys it’s possible these arm bands could have some kind of energy blast, which would be similar to The Mandarin’s rings in the comic as well.