Marvel fans rejoice, Shang Chi just made his long-awaited MCU return

It took over three years, but Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi is finally back in the Marvel Cinematic Universe - and it seems like the character will be appearing in two separate stories, if a recent trailer is anything to go by.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings officially hit cinemas in September 2021, but since then, we’ve basically not seen or heard any mention of the character within the MCU.

Technically, a picture of Shang-Chi popped up in the MCU Disney+ show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, but c’mon, that doesn’t count.

The character’s absence is pretty weird, considering that the after credits scene in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings implied that we’d be seeing Shang-Chi’s return sometime in the near future, but it has been confirmed that Simu Liu will be returning to the role eventually.

Take a look at the trailer for the upcoming third season of What If...? below.

A few months ago, Simu Liu stated in an interview with Times of India that Shang-Chi 2 is “definitely happening” but that he wasn’t at liberty to “say anything beyond that”.

Thankfully, we won’t have to wait for the sequel to come out, however, as we’ll be seeing Shang-Chi pop up in a different MCU project well before then.

Shang-Chi appears several times in a recent trailer for Marvel Animation’s What If…? and it seems that at least two of these appearances are from separate storylines.

The first of these shows a powerless Shang-Chi battling gunslingers in a Western saloon, and his second inclusion shows him combining his mech with a bunch of other Avengers’ mechs in a Power Rangers-style team-up (complete with the Ten Rings forming one of the Avenger Mech’s arms).

It’s sort of an educated guess that these are two separate episodes, as going from a gunslinging brawl to a Super Sentai Gundam brawl seems pretty unconnected to me but… hey, this is the MCU we’re talking about. Stranger things have definitely happened.